


Big Shot Courage

by smolhombre



Series: Bevy [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Breaking Up & Making Up, Bruce Banner is a Weird Bird, Can Probably Be Read as a Stand Alone If You CBF, Darcy Lewis Tries Very Hard, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fire Play (Referenced), Flawed characters, Friendship Makes the World Go Round, Hard Kinks, Introspection, Knifeplay, Love and Affection as Hard Kinks, Non-Sexual Kink, Politics, Porn That Has Grown Plot Over the Course of Three Fics, Power Dynamics, Violence, When Real Feelings Happen to Horny and Emotionally Stunted People, When Real Life Happens to Largely Extraordinary People
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-03-09 04:49:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13474029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: In retrospect, of course, it’s an oversight that she hadn’t really met the Other Guy until now. Darcy, one heel still on her foot, its broken twin brandished in her hands like a weapon, adds “BERATE BRUCE BANNER FOR BEING A STUBBORN ASSHOLE” to her mental to-do list, right underneath “DODGE THIS BULLET,” “DUCK BEHIND THIS CAR,” and “PLAN THE ASSASSINATION OF SECRETARY ROSS.”





	1. Chapter 1

1.

In retrospect, of course, it’s an oversight that she hadn’t really met the Other Guy until now. Darcy, one heel still on her foot, its broken twin brandished in her hands like a weapon, adds “BERATE BRUCE BANNER FOR BEING A STUBBORN ASSHOLE” to her mental to-do list, right underneath “DODGE THIS BULLET,” “DUCK BEHIND THIS CAR,” and “PLAN THE ASSASSINATION OF SECRETARY ROSS.”

An explosion rocks the street and Darcy wobbles to a stop, clutching at the lamppost closest to stay upright. The pavement is searing hot underneath her; already her one bare foot is blistered bloody. The ground is hardly still when she lurches forward again in a sprint, trying to lose herself in the screaming crowd fleeing out from the rubbled remains of Paddington Station.

Fast as a blink, the man in front of her — dark haired, lanky, glasses askew — goes down like a house of cards blown aside, blood blooming on his yellow shirt from a bullet that hits above his collarbone.

Darcy skids to a stop, lowering her shoe like a shield, dropping it like an anvil.

They know where she is; Darcy knows instinctively that the bullet was meant for her. It was her fault, anyway, that an entire train station has collapsed on itself and snipers are firing into the crowd. She _should_ have taken it, not a stranger. That might have even been an honorable way to go.

She looks up to the building across the street where the shot was fired from, unable to stop herself. She should run. She should move.

Her knees are water; Darcy is glued to the spot. She should move. She should move. She should move.

Faster than she can make her fifth plea to God and the ghost of Carrie Fisher, the Hulk rages down the street, kicking cars out of the way like they were only pebbles. His fist defaces the front of the building Darcy was gaping at, glass and brick and sheetrock piling at his massive feet as he barrages the face of the towering complex, hit after hit. A hoarse, grating cry rips from his wide chest, and Darcy feels the echo of it thrum in her bones. Rooted to the asphalt as she is, people only sometimes try to move around her as they dart away from the chaos. She’s pretty sure one of them nicks her bag, and another knocks her glasses off of her sweating face. It doesn’t faze her in the least, everything in her orbit swallowed up by the _relief_ of someone being here to save her ass. She’ll let Bruce string her up by her toes or put her in a little box or whatever else weird thing he wants for this.

Bodies are falling out of the building as the Hulk suddenly swivels around. He stares directly at her like his eyes were pulled there by a magnet.

Darcy beams at him, feeling stupidly buoyant, despite everything. She’s barely able to stop herself from throwing her arms wide, like she could wrap them around him. He stares at her for a moment, his expression so unlike anything she’s seen on Bruce’s face that her smile falters. Then he charges forward.

* * *

 

In a dream sandwiched between consciousness and the cloud of morphine like syrupy cotton in her mouth and nose, Bruce waits for her to wake up. She expects it; begs her body to cooperate for just a few seconds more before the black rolls back over her vision, just to open her eyes, just to check, just in case.

In a dream-dream, under the pillow of her IV drip, he’s there, at the foot of her bed. He reaches out and prods at her foot — why would he poke at her foot like that? His hair is a fluffy riot in the sterile light. He looks up to her, when she fidgets, like he could kiss her. Even in the dream, he doesn’t.

In the mostly wakefulness as a nurse audibly shuffles around in her room, Darcy can’t find a single cell in her body that doesn’t hurt. It’s an eon to pry her eyes open. There is no one in the room, when she manages.

* * *

 

Jane brings her lime green jello. Darcy can’t remember the last time she’s eaten, much last when she last wanted to.

“I think you were supposed to not be there,” Jane hums lightly, but her brow is heavy. Her hands shake, and her eyes are red. All of it is Darcy’s fault, and she winces before even trying to pry her stiff jaw open for the spoon.

Darcy’s left eye is so swollen she can nearly see the fat purple skin of her eyelid in her periphery. She can’t make her mouth cooperate for speech, but she can’t think of anything to say to that either, so it doesn’t matter.

Between bites, flashes come; of the station, of the street. The yellow shirt of the man in front of her, the green fist swinging her way and flinging her back. Darcy swallows them all down, tucked away for later when she can mourn and mope properly.

Jane spoons her jello mostly carefully until Darcy feels so full she’s bursting. Erik, maybe, joins her right as she drifts back to sleep.

* * *

 

Darcy, the nurse informs her cheerily, is in right shit shape. As she fusses over Darcy’s chart, she lists all of her injuries as if Darcy hasn’t already had this conversation with her before. Three cracked ribs, a concussion, a snapped ankle above a useless foot where the skin was so damaged they were still debating grafts. Her shoulder was out of socket when she arrived, her collarbone punctuated with two separate fractures. Two of her fingers are broken and swollen to fat, maroon sausages, green on the edges with healing and settled blood. Unbearably itchy stitches patch up a gash on the outside of her right thigh, and the little internal tears on her guts mottle her midsection like an oil spill. The rest of her, to the nurse’s morbid delight, is just beaten bloody. That’s the easy healing. That's just waiting.

Blissfully, magically, wonderfully, Darcy remembers nothing but blackness after the Hulk turned to face her on the street. It’s the biggest mercy she can imagine being gifted, under the circumstances.

Darcy can talk now, if she tries hard, so after an eternity of working her throat into submission she manages a “would you believe I’ve had worse?”

“That’s the spirit, dear. Ready for a drink?”

She props up as much as she’s able and sucks down water like her body has room for the seven oceans inside of it. Her head pounds from the constant stream of painkillers, and her stomach is never not twisting — in hunger or nausea or panic, Darcy can never sort out. The nurse takes the cup away, tutting.

“You’ll hurt yourself drinking so fast.”

“Oh, worm?” She rasps. Her eye, at least, isn’t as swollen anymore. _Recovery, bitches._

It’s the little things in life.

Jane is in her room even when the nurses try to shove her out. All her books and journals and her StarkPad are spread out around Darcy’s bed like a nest. Erik comes by at least once a day and sneaks her “old Swedish medicines,” mostly different alcohols in different measures. He wears socks that match, now, more often than not. It makes Darcy’s throat tight. He kisses her forehead before leaving each time.

She doesn’t see Bruce.

“Did Ross catch the Other Guy?” She manages one day, when she can’t stand it and is thirty sweaty, miserable minutes out from the last dregs of oxycodone and into clear thought.

“No.”

Jane doesn’t elaborate, but it’s enough. She doesn’t ask again.

* * *

 

The hospital releases her a month and four days into newly singledom. She stays with Jane’s mother and ignores Tony’s calls, when they come. Twice a day, no voicemail, for a week, until they stop.

“You know, I really am kinda bummed about this.” Darcy halves a lemon-poppyseed muffin and smears the insides in butter, cross legged on the guest bed and heedless of the crumbs that fall.

“Were you planning a wedding already? That’s unlike you.”

“I was planning a lot of non-sex now that we were past our first emotional hurdle. My list was like, two and a half pages long, just brainstorming. I had plans, Jane.” She shoves a bite into her mouth, continues speaking with her mouth full. “Shopping lists. Diagrams.”

“At least you didn't have to go through The Talk. He was angry enough already,” Jane says after a moment, sipping her coffee. Darcy had hidden Jane’s books and laptop charger to force a girlfriend heart-to-heart, but is still surprised that it’s actually working.

“The Hulk is always angry.”

“I mean Bruce.”

“...You’ve seen him? He said that?”

Jane studies the pattern of the comforter. “Not...really. He said you weren’t supposed to be there, and he told you —”

“Why are you just now telling me this?”

“It was right after they admitted you, Darcy, and you needed to rest, not to stress about Bruce.” She blows a strand of hair from her face.  “You wouldn’t have told me, if it was the other way around.”

“ _So_?”

“He just came by for a minute, Darce. He wasn’t even talking to me, I just overheard him on the phone. He was gone before I could catch him.”

“...But he _was_ at the hospital?”

Frowning, Jane licks jam from her thumb and doesn’t look at Darcy. “Does it matter? If he ever came back, I wouldn’t have let him see you anyway.”

Darcy gapes at her, then down at the tray in between them. Her chest is a sinkhole that swallows all the bruises, all the fractures, all the bumps and stitches and even the untouched parts of her body. It’s all the same, in the face of its empty suction.

“Darce?”

“I want to sleep, Jane. Thanks for breakfast.”

No matter how she adjusts the pillows behind her, they are too soft to be comfortable. Just as well, Darcy wouldn’t really be able to sleep with her head throbbing as it is.

Bruce knew, and he left anyway. She hadn’t realized how much hope she still had that he’d been maybe just unaware — still the Hulk, roaming somewhere. Maybe lost in space again, that seemed reasonable. Anything other than abandoning her because she was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. Wasn’t she always doing that, anyway?

Was she supposed to have let him come to London alone? It was obviously a trap, obviously just a way for Ross to get his hands on Bruce after Madame Masque in Israel. Darcy had told him as much no less than fifteen times.

“You’re jealous.” Bruce sounded surprised despite himself, eyebrows inching up to his hairline.

“Don’t be stupid,” Darcy had huffed. “I’m sure Betty would be nicer to me than you are. But this is clearly a tr —”

He grabbed her mouth, pinching her lips shut between his thumb and forefinger. “Who’s the dumb one, here?” His thumb dug into her skin until she felt blood bloom to the surface, tasted the salty copper on her tongue. “I know Betty. I don’t need your permission to go.”

“I know you dont,” she grumbled once he released her, licking a bit of red from his thumb. “But I am _asking_ you. And for your so-smart information, even if I were jealous, if I thought Betty were in actual trouble, I wouldn’t — I would want you to go, still. I can't believe you think I would be that petty.”

She was wearing his boxer briefs and nothing else, sprawled out on his kitchen floor. Darcy kept spoons in his freezer for the nights she slept over and woke with puffy eyes, and two of them were placed on her nipples like little anchors pinning her to the floor.  ( _“Taking up so much real estate in my house takes nerve. You’ve only got two eyes, this is all the spoons I have.” “You_ like _my nerve and my massive eyebags.” “Nerve and a massive ego. What man could resist?”_ ) Their cold burn kept her in a very soft, quiet place where Darcy was content to just be still; just to be near Bruce, sharing his orbit. Before the call, Bruce had been making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and talking through a theorem about black light, the rhythm of both lulling Darcy nearly to sleep. Her quiet place was so shattered now, though, she could hardly remember the languid feeling of it.

Bruce frowned down at her as she rose to her feet. “I am telling you to stay out of it. I mean that, Darcy.”

She hadn’t felt like sitting on her usual spot on the floor, so Bruce stretched across his couch to rest his feet in her lap as Tony readied the quinjet for them to leave. Darcy picked at a bit of string dangling from the hem of his jeans and tried to not ruin the last few minutes they’d have. This was his job. This is a package deal.

“Did you want to hear what I had planned for you with the rest of the spoons?”

“You know I don’t.”

Bruce groaned. “Your pouting face will give you wrinkles, you know.”

“Do you care?”

He swung his feet off her lap. “You are being a brat. If it were you, I would go.”

“If I were _actually there_ , and not a piecemeal recording cooked up by the Secretary of Defense to _kidnap your rage monster_.”

“Darcy,” he said quietly, rising to his feet.

“And you know what! What if Betty _is_ there, and she’s _helping him_? Did you really leave things on good terms?”

“Darcy.”

“Don’t act like _I’m_ the unreasonable one, here!”

His hand covered her mouth, pushing her head back into the couch. She glared daggers up at him, but resisted the urge to bite. No matter how upset she was, she wouldn’t risk actually breaking skin like this; radiation poisoning would be the cherry on top of an already shit day.

“Shut up.” His hand shook. “What do you possibly have to be upset about? Did you sign up to nursemaid the Hulk? It's not your job. I said to leave it.”

She wrenches away from his hand. “I signed up to _give a damn_ about you and my _friends_. I’m fucking sorry that I’m invested in keeping you alive, the sensation must be foreign.”

A knock on the door cut his reply off before he could make it. Darcy scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, unable to look up at him. This was _ridiculous_. She wasn’t a teary-eyed damsel and she wasn’t a fool. Whatever playacting they did, Bruce was crossing a fucking line, here. He also seemed content to stare at her while the knocking on the door increased in volume and frequency.

“What’s wrong?” She snapped. “Go get yourself killed, since that’s what you fucking want.”

“Yes, you know what I want.” He leaned close, hands bracing against the couch on either side of her. For a second, Darcy thought he would kiss her temple. He didn't. “When I come back, you need to be here. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” she spat, full of acid. “Doing what you say is what I signed up for, after all. Can’t wait to meet Betty.”

In the impersonal cleanliness of Mama Foster’s guest room, Darcy grabs her phone from the nightstand, trying to shake the memory loose. She plays her crossword app robotically until her eyes are blurry and her face is wet. It’s the empty kind of cry that doesn’t so much as hitch her breathing, and that’s easy enough to ignore even as the letters on her screen wiggle and swim around.

A text notification appears on her screen as Darcy circles MARSHMALLOW in the game. She’s already swiping it away when she sees Pepper’s name. Groaning, she opens the message.

_Hi Darcy. I hope you are feeling as well as the circumstances allow. I hate to bother you, since I’m sure you’re resting, but when you have a moment could you please check your work email? I’ve sent you some forms that need your signature. (PTO, insurance, etc.). If you need anything from me, please let me know. Lab operations have been put on a hiatus until everyone is back and this storm has blown over, so take all the time to heal that you need._

Her read receipts are on, because Darcy is a jackass who loves to suffer, and so she forces herself to type back a quick response. ( _Thank you very much, I will fill them out ASAP. The flowers you sent to the hospital were beautiful btw._ )

Her inbox has 1,673 messages when she logs into it.

Actually, the forms can wait, because fuck that.

Darcy turns her phone off and rolls over, pretending she never received Pepper’s request. When it still doesn’t beckon sleep her way, she pretends she never ran into Bruce late that night in the lab, never sat up on his desk and asked for a quickie. When that doesn’t work, she goes back even further and pretends she didn’t apply for an internship in the desert.

* * *

 

They are poring over a notebook together, sat shoulder to shoulder on his couch. He smells like he’s used Darcy’s shaving cream again, and Darcy wants nothing but to sit on his face until her legs are jello.

“Your equation is wrong here.”

“Is it?” She leans close, watching him stare unrepentantly at her chest in the process.This is one of his favorite shirts, if only because the buttons refuse to stay buttoned under the strain of any movement, no matter how small. “Are you gonna hit me with your ruler until I learn?”

He is trying very hard to not smile as he snaps the composition book closed.

“Open up, Darcy.”

Biting the inside of her cheek to keep from collapsing in the giggles, Darcy makes a show of spreading her legs. There’s a little hole in the inside seam of her leggings, midway up the thigh. Darcy knows this because Bruce hooks a finger in it and tugs until the stitching rips beyond repair.

“You need so much attention. It’s draining.” He rakes his nails up her skin, hard enough red trails puff up in his wake, before pinching her so hard she can’t bear it. “Something I can _use_ , Darcy.”

Darcy snaps her legs shut as soon as he releases her, the left one still wobbling and smarting. She opens her mouth and imagines the color blue her leg will bruise. She’ll wear a skirt to the lab the rest of the week so they catch peeks of it, she’ll send him pictures when she gets home each day to show how the color progresses; she knows he likes to keep them.

He snaps his fingers in front of her face.

“Do you really have to try and think right now?”

Darcy knows better than to close her offered mouth to answer, so she shrugs instead as he pulls a ballpoint pen out of his pocket. Then she wakes up.

* * *

 

_Pick up your phone, Tony._

Darcy’s video chat app blooms to life on her Stark Pad as soon as she sends the message.

“You’ve been ghosting me for two weeks now, and suddenly it’s an emergency you speak to me?”

He’s in his private workspace, way under the lowest complex basement and lit purely in very thin, artificial light. It’s unforgivingly bright, and he looks like utter shit underneath it. No sleep, no shower, too much coffee keeping his hands a fine tremble, and his eyes wild over the heavy blue and purple bags sagging beneath.

“I got an invoice from the hospital today.”

Tony immediately starts digging in a nearby box full of metal bits and bobs of indefinite description.

“You didn’t have to pay all of it. I could have set up a plan, or something. I didn’t expect you to.”

“It’s nothing. That’s not hyperbole, the whole stay was cheaper than carting you home to do it. Maybe universal healthcare is on to something.”

“Yeah, well I don’t want to be home,” Darcy mumbles, adjusting the StarkPad so less of her grimy pajamas are in frame. She would keep some dignity.

“Take your time, enjoy the drugs. The lab assistants were all sent off to make money for big pharma and whatever else, so you aren’t missing anything. I won’t hire anyone else until you screen them to avoid a repeat of the AIM espionage disaster of 2016 —”

“I don’t want to be home,” Darcy repeats. It’s very hard to look up into the screen and the slow, dawning realization cresting Tony’s face. “I — resign?” She pinches between her brow. “No, that sounds stupid. I...Tony, I don’t know if I can work there anymore.”

Tony gapes at the screen. “You’re going to quit over _Bruce_?”

“I’m going to _quit_ because this job is _bad for my health_ ,” she snaps. “I’m not so fucking petty I couldn’t be an adult with an ex. To everyone’s apparent surprise,” she tacks on, sulky.

“So it is an ex thing, now, officially?”  
Darcy gives him the finger.

“...You know, Bruce isn’t even here,” Tony says slowly. “So, although of course it _doesn’t_ matter to you...Well. He’s not here. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be.”

Groaning, Darcy thunks her head against the screen.

“When’s the last time you washed your hair, Lewis?”

“When’s the last time you washed _yours_?”

It’s quiet, and Darcy fiddles with some of the pill bottles on her nightstand before speaking again.

“What do you get out of this job, Tony? Like for you.”

“Uh.” Tony looks around the workshop like he’s begging something to set on fire. “Vali...dation?”

“Do you know what I get out of this job? Sitting around waiting for everyone to die or mess up so someone else dies — so _I_ die — while I sit on my hands, because I can’t do anything _but_ wait for it to happen.”

“Do you want a suit? Is this where you’re going? I can make you a suit.”

“No, Tony. SHIELD is dead, HYDRA is out of commission, and there’s no reason I have to hide behind StarkTech anymore. No one cares what I saw in the desert now.”

“...You should really be telling Pepper this,” Tony says finally, wiping sweat out of his eyes with the hem of his shirt.

“I already wrote her an email. But I saw the bill from the hospital and I...wanted to tell you first. I’ll pay you back,” she adds quickly. “Not all at once. But.”

Tony waves her off. “Hazard pay. Anyone not you would have sued me for at least that anyway.”

“Still.”

She and Tony look at each other for a moment through the screen. In another life, Darcy thinks they could have really been friends. He’s trying to do that now, she thinks, but everything is too raw to even bother considering his offered olive branch.

“If I see Bruce —”

“Thanks again, Tony. For everything.”

He clears his throat. “Right. Right. Don’t...be a stranger, Lewis. Let me know if you—”

She closes the call, buries her face in her borrowed pillow, and cries herself to sleep.

* * *

 

She’s aware, at least, that this one is a dream. Bruce cups her face in hands that don’t shake. He kisses her hair. He enters her slowly, and he doesn’t even make her beg when she comes once, twice, three times.  After, the hair on his chest scratches pleasantly at Darcy’s cheek, and his arms are heavy on her, but they are not pushing her away.

Darcy rolls over in the blue dark and takes two of the chalky pain tablets dry. She sleeps through the next day entirely, not waking again until the sun is setting pink and orange outside of her window.

She can’t settle after waking. After nibbling on some crackers and steeling her stomach and resolve both, Darcy pulls out her StarkPad and books a flight home.

* * *

 

Mama Foster, shorter and broader than Jane, though with the same delicate nose and chin, sends Darcy off misty-eyed and sniffling. For her part, Darcy is full on squawling as Jane settles her in the car.

“Why is your mom so _nice_?”

“You can stay, if you’re attached? You don’t have to leave if you don’t want to,” Jane offers, clearly at a loss.

Rubbing endlessly at her runny, stuffy nose, Darcy presses her forehead against  the car’s window and tries to not feel sorry for herself. Things could be, objectively, so much worse.

Halfway to the airport, Jane stops at a red light adjacent to a farmer’s market. People mill about, and even in the car Darcy can hear the strumming of the guitarist crooning on the corner.

It’s nice. It’s calm. It makes Darcy want to itch and crawl out of her skin. She thunks her forehead against the window a few times, each dull noise like a drumbeat to the guitar outside. At number six, she sees a large man making a beeline for their car.

Oh no. Not now, when she’s so close to being free.

The man starts waving wildly, and even Jane peers over to get a look. “I have my taser,” Darcy murmurs, looking between the figure and the stubbornly red light. The sun is so bright it’s hard to get a close look at the man until he’s nearly touching the car.

Huge, and solid, and blonde. Laden with bags from the market is Thor, smiling like he’s won the lottery.

“What the _fuck_?” She and Jane sputter in unison.

Thor taps on the window eagerly, gesturing for Darcy to roll it down. Around them, people are swerving out from behind their idling car as the light turns green, horns blaring.

“I was looking for you!” Thor beams, delighted.

“In the farmer’s market?” Jane huffs.

His face only falls a little before he recovers. “In London. I heard about Darcy, and I wanted to...well. I wanted to see. I just got a little hungry on the way.”

He offers Darcy a plum from the paper bag hooked on his arm, followed by a neatly tied bag of homemade crackers and a wrapped block of cheese. It looks a bit like he nibbled straight from the cheese itself. The imprints of his teeth are massive.

“Do you not like these? I have some clementines. You look like you need to eat…” Thor offers after a beat of stunned silence.

With a great wail, Darcy flings herself out of the car and throws her arms around Thor’s middle.

She wakes with her face buried so deep in her pillow she can’t breathe. Darcy flings the covers off and the dream with it, panting and disoriented.

Thor in a farmer’s market. Offering her plums from a farmer’s market. Offering her handmade biscuits from a farmer’s market in London, where Thor was looking for her.

Darcy squints at her nightstand. Was he wearing a flannel? He should have been wearing a flannel, if he wasn’t.

Her head feels heavy as an overripe fruit as she stumbles into the kitchen and almost directly into Jane.

“Shit. Shit. Sorry. Forgot my glasses.” She scrubs at her face. “Fucking — _drugs_ have me dreaming the craziest shit, Jane. I saw Thor in a farmer’s market and he wasn’t even wearing a _flannel._ ” Darcy grabs blindly for a bowl in the cabinet. “My brain can’t even do one thing right. All my trouble, and all I want is a little chest hair peeking out of a stretched-thin flannel collar. Why is that hard?”

As she digs in the refrigerator for milk, a warm hand settles on her lower back. A very warm hand. Rough, and trembling, and very familiar.

Darcy whirls around, pressed flat to the fridge door. In the blurry outline she can make out by squinting very hard, Bruce raises both hands up in placation.

“Sorry. Sorry. I won’t touch you.”

“What are you doing? How did you — where’s Jane?”

“She and her mom went out, and I. I picked the lock?”

Darcy gapes. “I need my glasses. I need a — need a bra, maybe. If you aren’t here when I come back, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth and skin you.”

Stumbling back to her bedroom, Darcy slides her glasses on and then Mama Foster’s borrowed housecoat, pulling her hair up as gingerly as possible. When she returns to the kitchen, Bruce has sat himself at the little kitchenette table. His sweatshirt is smeared in mud and is no less than three sizes too big. He’s got a little beard growing in, streaked with grey. His eyes are puffy and his hands, clasped on the table, are mottled in bruises of all shapes and shades.

Darcy wants to crawl in his lap, maybe sit at his feet while he scratched idly at her scalp. She wants to fling the knife block next to her at him, to never be near him again.

Stiffly, she sits down across from him.

“You broke into my house. Why do you know how to break into a house?”

“Most locks are all the same. It’s so simple it’s barely engineering.”

When Darcy blinks she sees a green fist. When she opens her eyes she has to shake the hospital room away, relive each hope she had to let go of that this time, he would be there.

“How long have you been back?”

“London? I just got here.”

She takes a very deep breath. “Back as Bruce.”

He looks down at the table. “Little under a month and a half.”

It’s quiet.

“Tony said you weren’t coming back to the lab.”

“Back to Jersey for me,” she nods. Her throat is so tight it’s like she left it in the dryer too long. “Home sweet home.”

“Good,” Bruce nods. It’s a hammer to the cage of her chest. It keeps swinging even through the creaking protests, the wobbling thrum where it threatens to break. “That’s good, Darcy.”

“Are you going back?”

“I’ll probably head up towards Scotland for a while — lots of green to blend into, you know how it is. But, maybe. Probably, actually. One day.”

Darcy looks down at her hands. Her lips are shredded and sore from nibbling on them as she has been, bored and anxious and bedridden, and now as she worries a bit of skin there blood blooms up to the surface, sinking copper in between her teeth. She wipes it away, suddenly embarrassed — about the blood, about how she must look, about being hurt in the first place.

“Good. That’s probably best, for you.”

The grin on Bruce’s face is knife sharp and unkind. “Is that something important to you?”

Darcy wants to hurl something at him. “Don’t be an asshole. After everything, you don’t get to be an asshole to me about this.”

“...Force of habit,” Bruce mutters after a long, tense pause. Darcy can't help but think of what that outburst would have gotten her _before_. He pinched her tongue between a wooden clothespin, once, after she ragged on him for humming “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” under his breath; had fed her little morsels of her dinner around the intrusion heedless of the drool pooling on his knee. Once, after drinking a beer too many on his couch, Darcy had climbed in his lap and whined and wiggled and begged for attention until he sat her on the floor between his knees, spread in a V. She’d nuzzled forward blindly, mouthing through his jeans until he pulled her back, tutting that she knew better. He’d tied her shirt around her mouth and made her watch as he’d stroked himself as close to coming as he dared.

Darcy feels close to welling up, remembering. He’d watched her the whole time, face flushed, and the sight of him looking at her, drinking her up, was somehow better than she even imagined actual, physical sex with him would be. A punishment and a reward, one in the same.

“Darce.”

She swallows and can’t keep from asking. She’s owed it. “What happened, Bruce?”

He doesn’t answer for long enough that Darcy doesn’t think he ever will. Maybe she should have expected that. Maybe it’s best she doesn’t know, so she can assign blame as she sees fit, depending on the day or the minute. A non-answer; a punishment and a reward, one in the same.

“Somewhere after Brazil, it got easier. Sharing, being both. Most days now I don’t have to think about keeping it together. But I. It’s worse, when you’re around. Sometimes it’s harder than it was even in the beginning.” Bruce leans forward suddenly, pinching between his brow. “It’s not exactly like we’re two people, you know. But it’s not — we aren’t the same, either. Whatever understanding we had or were getting at, you ruined it. I think he h— he hates you. He blames you for...it feels like a cage, when we aren’t at the steering wheel. I've been so careful to not lose — I know it felt like I was smothering him, when we were together. When he was out and saw you, I. It doesn’t mean anything, but I tried to stop him.”

Darcy doesn’t realize she’s crying until she can’t breathe under it, wiping at her face with the cuff of her robe. Bruce watches her for several very long minutes.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce says quietly. “It wasn’t fair of me to come. I just w— I’ll leave.”

“You didn’t ever tell me that. You didn't even try to talk to me.”

“...Would you have wanted me to?”

A not small part of Bruce hated her the whole time. Maybe it was more than getting his rocks off, what he did with her. Something genuine, and not playacting. Not teasing. Maybe he did want her to hurt.

A fresh wave of tears starts to spill, hot on her cheeks. Bruce, wordlessly, turns to leave. He’s nearly to the door when Darcy manages to speak, one last hurt she wants him to give her.

“How’s Betty?”

“Gone.”

The door clicks closed, then locked. Darcy can’t wait to be home.

* * *

 

Darcy’s Aunt Joey tried marriage, once, before giving it up two weeks into her on the job training. Divorced at twenty three and perpetually single since, she moved in with her brother when Darcy was only two and has stayed through her parent’s divorce, Darcy’s goth phase, and more stray cats than Darcy could count. It’s her aunt that picks her up from the airport, when Darcy finally makes it back, and it’s her aunt that smooths circles onto Darcy’s back when Darcy wakes up in the middle of the night, batting away phantom fists and the imagined crumbles of concrete and shards of glass caught in her hair.

“You’re here, Darce. You’re home.”

Darcy lets Joey comb clumsy fingers through her knotted hair and accepts the drink Joey brings her from their kitchen.

“This is the last of the whiskey in the house, so this Fuck It All better be worth it.”

The Fuck It All was Joey’s solution to everything from Darcy’s first period to her horrendous junior prom to that one time her intern/booty call in London turned out to be a HYDRA plant. Cinnamon tea, whiskey, lemon, and a few shots of Texas Pete: Fuck It All was a guaranteed mood changer. If it was for the positive or negative seemed to be a matter of chance.

Darcy gulps down half of it in one go.

“...He was older than you, wasn’t he?” Joey eyes her shrewdly in the orange lamplight illuminating Darcy’s bedroom. “Must have been, to fuck you up this good. Wanted to tie you down while he had some years still left. We aren't the matrimonial type, though, are we, Darce?”

Darcy shakes the ridiculous image of a white dress in a two mile radius of Bruce Banner out of her head; it makes her want to vomit. “God, no. Not at all.” She takes another drink. “He'd probably rather die.”

That remains a painful truth, that remains one of the things she is certain of, still.

Joey crosses her stocky legs, inching her toes under Darcy’s quilt. “All the more dick, him.” She watches Darcy nurse her drink for a moment longer. “You know, you haven’t exactly explained yourself, DJ.”

She is not even riled by the old nickname. “I do know.”

“...My friend Elenor is a great attorney who owes me a favor. If you wanted to handle this legally—”

“He didn’t —” Didn’t what? Hit her? Bruce definitely did. Like he said himself, it’s not like the Hulk was a totally separate consciousness from Bruce, who was hurting her already, even if it was in ways she liked. She can’t even blame the Other Guy completely. This was just the first big hurt that crossed her threshold. How could she explain that to Joey? “It’s not like that.”

“Just an accident, then.” Joey rolls her eyes. Her bleached hair is a curly riot like Darcy’s, and in sleep has tripled in size with frizz. She pushes some of it back from her tired face, biting down a yawn. “I dream about accidents all the time.”

After everything, hasn’t Joey earned a little trust?

“You know how I told you about that Lab Manager job? With Jane?” It’s been a secret so long keeping it feels like a compulsion. Darcy still can’t shake the feeling that Coulson will appear in her bedroom like a phantom and put her down for talking about it. Darcy clears her throat. She knows better than to be afraid of a ghost. It doesn’t matter, now, and it’s not like Darcy would ever talk about any actual stuff she _knows_. “After I. Well. Ian wasn’t a coincidence. Him being HYDRA. Jane found some...stuff. In the desert.” She licks her lips. That wasn’t too much, was it? Nothing Joey could get in trouble knowing. “And the job upstate was for. Well. StarkTech.” Technically, she got paid out of StarkTech’s budget, so this is not a lie.

“...Tony Stark did this to you?”

Darcy shudders. “God, no. Too much aftershave, I couldn’t ever — no. I mean. I met someone when I was there. Someone who I... _liked_.” She cringes. This bit, for Joey to understand, she may just have to say. “B— It was Bruce Banner.”

Joey is quiet, her mouth slack.

“Darcy,” she murmurs. “Don’t tell me _it_ did this to you.”

“Not _it_. He —I mean, it was the Other Guy, really. But I know it doesn’t matter! I know it doesn’t, don’t look at me like that. I left, okay?”

“Being with someone means seeing them angry.” Joey pauses, leaning over to touch Darcy’s arm. “It means being safe despite their temper. You can’t work through every anger.”

Darcy downs the last of her Fuck It All. “Is it me?” She finally asks, voice small and warbling.

“Your taste in men? No, that's genetic.”

“My _rotten luck_.”

Joey sighs, blowing hair out of her face. “Did you love him, Darcy?”

“I do.” She clears her throat. “I did.”

“You enjoyed yourself?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Then maybe, for now, you think about how that was worth it, until you think about the rest. You enjoy what you had and be proud of yourself you got out.”

* * *

 

For what it's worth, Darcy does try to follow Joey’s advice. Even when it’s hard. Especially then.

* * *

 

Pepper, as a parting gift, covers her tenure in the lab as a PR Manager job for StarkTech’s R&D department (Tony signs the reference letter himself, there’s coffee stains on the bottom corner of it). Darcy twists her time interning in London to a “crisis management” position complete with grant writing experience, and together with a sparkling commendation from her old department chair, it’s easier than it should be to land a job on the congressional campaign management team for Sylvia Rashid.

Darcy loves political science. She hates politics. In the bathroom branching off from the middle school gym where Sylvia is giving a speech on funding for school lunches, Darcy pulls a bottle of clear nail polish out of her bag and paints it over a small run in her tights to keep it from ripping further. Sylvia is nice, as far as politicians go (even the good ones are megalomaniacs at worst, narcissists at best. Sylvia is thankfully just the latter). Darcy even thinks she’s the right person for the job. But politics, like this, is tedious. The speeches are rehearsed, even the “mistakes,” even the fumbles or the shine of a teardrop that never comes, welling up in a shrewd eye.

Still, Sylvia means every practiced, weighed out word she says. Darcy wants her to win. But she will never work for a campaign again. When Sylvia gets the seat, Darcy is angling for a cushy, stationary job on the Hill, or at least in Sylvia’s state office. Mid-level, low key, unimportant to the big picture but indispensable to daily function. One where wearing heels every day doesn’t make her feel like amputating both legs, and the furthest she has to walk is to the door for her Panera delivery, and the longest she has to stand is for the Keurig to pour her a nice cup of the fancy, name-brand pods Sylvia insists on.

It will be a nice, soul numbing break. When her re-election campaign comes around, Darcy will find employment elsewhere. She’d take a Waffle House night shift to this.

Under the lipstick graveyard in her purse, her phone begins to vibrate. Jane’s face peeks out underneath all the bullets and shiny tubes, and it’s a relief to prop up against the sink and answer in a long, high pitched whine.

“Good morning to you too.”

“Remember when the big dude came at us in New Mexico?”

“...Thor?”

“Bigger.”

“The Destroyer?”

“Yeah. I want him to come to square up with me. He should have ended it then. Coward.”

Jane snorts at the other end of the line. “I’m glad you’re in a good mood.”

“It’s raining non-stop and I’ve been in heels all week because of Trina’s stupid dress code memo; my ankle feels like it’s a big, flaming pool noodle. Useless and on fire all the time and begging me to take a hacksaw to it. Did you get that hotel shit figured out for your conference?”

“You mean did I get your e-mail where you fixed it for me and reserved my rental car? Yes. That’s partly why I called.”

“Thank me in chocolates.”

“You didn’t have to do that, Darcy. I know you’re busy with work. I have had to make my own hotel reservations before you.”

“Pepper got me a bougie wallet for Christmas last year, as like, part of our bonus. A nice Kate Spade one. You could get me the matching bag if you wanted to like, really show me you care.”

There’s a sudden wave of applause outside the door.

“Right. I know you’re busy,” Jane says. Her voice has risen in pitch, which makes Darcy tense as a woman with a very long, beautiful plait of blonde hair walks in the bathroom and into the stall closest to the door. Jane was nervous. That couldn’t be good. “I wanted to say thanks for the hotel, and then I. Well. I had a guest today. A visitor.”

“...Your period?”

“Thor.”

“I’m sorry. Did you just say Thor?”

“Yeah. He just wanted to...catch up, I guess. He was talking with my mom when I came back from taking my measurements today — Darce, did I tell you, I think I found out why that equation was adding up wrong, I feel so stupid. That last sample was an _anomaly_ , it — “

“Less science, more ex-boyfriend. I don’t get paid to astrophysics anymore.”

“Did you ever?” Jane huffs. “He asked about you, and I just wanted to warn you in case he, uh. Pops up in your orbit.”

“Was that a space joke?”

“Darcy.”

Darcy bites the inside of her cheek. On the other end of the line comes a metallic crash, then the hissing sound of fizz.

“Oh, fuck — _balls_ , that’s my last sample!” Jane cries. The line goes dead, and Darcy is left staring at her phone, lips pursed.

“Excuse me.”

She jumps, looking up to the woman stepping out of the stall as she shoves her phone back in her purse.

“Sorry if I was being loud. My mom had a nervous bladder, too, if that bothered you. Figured it was loud enough out there to cover me.”

“Did I hear you say Thor?” As she washes her hands in the sink, the woman’s eyes never leave Darcy. “Do you know him?”

Darcy scoffs. “I wish. Biblically, if you catch my drift.” Her hands are sweaty. The woman looks familiar, close like this; Darcy looks her up and — there. A lanyard half-hangs out of her pants pocket, announcing her as part of the press corps. Darcy has an ass to cover, stat. “Thor is our nickname for my girlfriends ex. He’s like a golden retriever in a man’s body, so it seemed fitting.”

“It would be cool if you did know him. Sylvia has spoken against the Accords before, hasn’t she? And that last bill the Senate Armed Services committee was kicking around about a registry.”

“She’s been vocal about privacy laws for civilians, too.” Darcy’s words feel flimsy. She resists the urge to clear her throat, shrugging instead and trying to look unbothered. “Like I said, I wish I did know the Name Brand variety. If you catch the big guy flying around, ask him for an endorsement. Then give him my number.”

She’s wearing her most charming smile, but she doesn’t think it’s working.

The woman towels her hands dry before offering one to Darcy. “Alex Jackson. Nice to meet you, Darcy.”

Darcy’s stomach is a sour churn. She’s not Sylvia’s campaign manager or in her real inner circle, but it’s still possible a reporter would know her name with even a little digging. If they’re in the corps, it’s likely Alex just saw Darcy’s name and photo on one of the lists security flips through at each stop. It doesn’t mean anything that she already knows it.

She shakes Alex’s hand. “Which paper are you with, again?”

“I was with the _Bugle_ for a few years when I still lived in New York. I freelance now.”

“It’s hard to get a spot as a campaign reporter for a freelancer, isn’t it?”

Alex winks. Her brown eyeliner has smeared a bit under her eyes, starting to crepe and line with age. “People still owe me favors. I’m sure you know how it is.”

Darcy hums vaguely. “Must be nice. I’ll let you get back to it. I have to make some schedule adjustments for tomorrow, so...”

“Changes? Anything you’d like to comment on?”

Darcy smiles, a tiny bit genuine. “Pass. Nice to meet you.”

She forces herself to not look back as she heads straight for the crowd, trying to wind through the mass of bodies to lose any eyes before marching to the campaign car parked in the most secluded area of the parking lot. Darcy leans the seat all the way back and tries to breathe past the crushing certainty that she has fucked up.

When the intern finds her sprawled in the car forty five minutes later, half dozing, she feigns a migraine and sends him on a Starbucks run. The muffin is a little stale, but she pretends the frappuccino makes her feel better.

* * *

 

Trina DiMarco runs Sylvia’s campaign like a dragon guarding a nest. She and Sylvia went to graduate school together, were in the same sorority in undergrad, and live in the same neighborhood now as adults. They also fuck each other loudly and without much concern for discretion or pretense.

Campaign funds are inherently tight, so more often than not the staff is funnelled into a cheap hotel room, three to a bed, or to the questionably clean/safe homes of volunteers —  this is who coached my boyfriend in peewee football, this is my dentist’s uncle, this is who I bought my cat from.

Trina and Sylvia get a room together at whatever three-plus-star hotel is closest, for the sake of austerity and also proximity to each others genitals. They never stay with volunteers. Tonight, Darcy doesn’t either. Milking her migraine excuse from earlier, she heads to the closest motel and hands her card over to the freckle-faced man at the front desk before he’s even finished saying hello. Up in her room, Darcy flings her heels off violently, as if they were leeches clung to her, her bra following just as eagerly. Bathed and dressed in the comfiest sleep shirt she had shoved in the bottom of the carry-on luggage she’s been carting around for weeks, Darcy settles on the bed and thinks.

She has Bruce’s number still in her phone, and not for the first time she aches to call him, or send him a text, a funny picture, a gif at 3:32 in the morning when she can’t sleep, just so he also has to wake up and look at it.

What would he tell her? She worries too much, her brain’s not built for all that activity at once.

Darcy wrinkles her nose. It doesn’t feel comforting in the least, saying it to herself.

What else, then? The last time she felt so cornered and afraid he was in Israel, and he’d held her down at his feet for hours after, small and contained, until they made it back to his room.

Darcy wiggles down in the cool, slippy glide of the comforter and wraps herself in as tight of a burrito as she’s able.

Bruce smells like Dove soap and whatever toiletries of Darcy’s he’s been plundering in. The sheets here smell like nothing. Darcy still dreams about Paddington Station, still flinches away from a certain shade of green and shakes, sometimes, her chest collapsing in on itself, apropos of nothing. But she dreams about the other stuff, too. She misses it.

She types a message out on her phone.

_Yo i know this is random_

Darcy erases it, turns on the TV and flicks it to the Food Network just for noise.

She types again.

_I know this is dumb but i_

Darcy erases it.

_I feel like this is breaking some rule or something dumb but I was thinking about you. Hope everything’s okay._

Darcy doesn’t erase it, but she doesn’t press send, either. She wishes, suddenly, that she could call Jane, but her moping isn’t enough of an emergency to wake her up in the middle of the night. Joey would talk her through it, if Darcy really needed it, but Joey doesn’t know Bruce, and as Darcy tries to invest in the TV screen, she realizes that’s what she really wants.

She scrolls through the contacts in her phone aimlessly. If she hadn’t left, what would she be doing now? A million half formed possibilities flit through her brain, sometimes more than one at a time, sometimes lingering on one longer than another, almost with focus. It eats up the rest of the show on the TV and half of its following program.  

When the hotel phone at her bedside rings, Darcy screams and nearly exists the confines of her skin.

This only happens in horror movies. Who would call her here? Everyone at work had her cell. She’s slow pulling it up to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Yes ma’am. You have a visitor in the lobby looking for you, we have to check before sending them up or giving them your room number.”

“Ah. Wh— who is it?”

Darcy hears a rustling noise on the other end of the line. She winces. She should have just said yes, maybe she would have been able to spare this man’s life —

She’s up and shucking on her shoes when she hears the voice coming through the phone.

“Can she hear me? I told you I can find it myself —”

Darcy drops her shoe, falling back on the bed.

“Let him up,” she breathes into the phone. “‘Let him _up_ , please.”

She hangs up the phone and kicks her strewn belongings into the corner for a semblance of order. Darcy flings up the comforter and smooths her hair back from her face and turns the TV off, so it’s just the loud noise of her breathing and her racketing pulse as she waits.

_Fuck._


	2. 2.

2.

For Bruce’s birthday, Darcy had let him cash in on some of his Most Scary propositions over the course of the month, leading up to an _exquisite_ performance (if Darcy says so herself) involving a hitachi, a plug with a loop at the base he could hook his fingers in, three glasses of bourbon, and the entire contents of his left desk drawer. Some of his requests — a trail of fire on her back, quickly lit and quickly extinguished when she’d screamed into to floor — remained just as scary, if not more. Some of them, however, were really, actually, fucking great.

From her favorite, there’s a scar — hairline thin, bone white, flat to her skin — an inch below her collarbone, straight enough to level a house on. There are others that match it in width and precision (a neat row like a staff of sheet music underneath the curving bend of her right knee, a few dashes like morse code parallel to her spine, low on her back where it swells to her rear. One, a curve like a smile under one buttock. Another seam on the wrinkled sole of her left foot like an arrow), but the line on her chest is her favorite. When she isn’t focused on forgetting, she catches herself stroking at it like she would before; working in the lab, stood in her kitchen, soaking in Bruce’s unfairly large and criminally underused bathtub. When he caught her petting at it, sometimes his face would go a little softer. Sometimes it would shutter up.

She mused that it was a few things: a price tag, a brand, an anchor. When she touched it, some days it was more one thing than another. It looked good. Intentional, like art.

_“Darcy Lewis,” Razorblade on skin, new and recycled parts. Bruce Banner, 2018._

She loved it.

He would look at it too, when her shirts were cut low enough; stare steady on the silvery skin, not even looking a little lower to her cleavage. Darcy, for reasons she still isn’t clear on, felt it was too private or intrusive to ask him what he thought about while looking at it. In retrospect, she regrets that, because now she can make it anything. Some of the things she wants him to have thought leave her chest aching. Most of them do.

Darcy wonders what he would do now, seeing her stood in a too big, stretched thin t-shirt in a Days Inn, one hand pressed across her chest so fingers rest on the scar, the other wrapping around her middle as she waits for a knock on her door to punctuate the thudding footsteps she hears in the hall.

Then she actually starts to think about it, and shoves the images away.

Thor’s broad back and shoulders fill the doorway so quickly and completely Darcy is sure she is imagining it. As she tries to drink the sight of him in, he seems to shift and move like a mirage on the edges. Maybe that bit is just her threatening to cry. He has bags in his hands from the QT around the corner, and Darcy’s lip is very close to trembling. She can hardly get a good look at him before he’s stepping forward, close enough to smell the familiar ozone clung to his skin.

He kicks the door closed with his heel. Darcy only watches him, still torn on if this is a dream or not. He plops the bags on the bed before wrapping Darcy in a hug, kissing the crown of her head briefly.

Not a dream, then. Or at least a very good one.

“You look better than I thought you would.”

“I’m a tough broad,” she croaks, still gaping at his chest in disbelief as she squeezes his middle.  “But you probably shouldn’t ever tell that to another woman the rest of your life.”

He shouldn’t be here. This was bad. That reporter already suspected something fishy.

Darcy doesn’t want him to leave. She watches him set out his wares on her bed with his back turned to her and tries to swallow past her thick throat.

“You’ve cut your hair.” It feels like a very small thing to say, but it’s the only thing she can manage. Every thought churns out slow, tugs like a pulled tooth; his hair is short. He brought taquitos. There are more types of candy bars in one bag than Darcy could count. The beer he brought is decent. His jacket has Captain America’s old shield embroidered on the chest.

He turns around, beer outstretched in offering, and Darcy does a double take. Ignoring the drink, she reaches up to Thor’s face.

“What’s this?”

His smile is only a little sad and mostly, oddly bashful as he allows her to stroke at his cheek and brow around the edges of the plain eyepatch covering his right eye.

“It’s nothing. A souvenir.”

“Bruce didn’t mention this to me,” Darcy murmurs, her frown tight between her brows. “How could he not mention this happening to you? Did he know?”

Thor clears his throat and pulls away, looking a little uneasy.

“I’m not going to make you, I don’t know, break bro-code or whatever,” Darcy grumbles. “But it was shit of him not to mention it. He knows we’re friends.”

She accepts the beer he offers now, clinks it against his own as they flop on the bed together, shoulder to shoulder.

“I wanted to tell Jane myself. To tell everyone myself,” Thor says gruffly, following a barely awkward pause. “For that, anyway, don’t be too hard on him.”

Darcy takes a big gulp of her beer. “Yeah. Working on it.”

She tips over to the side, all but headbutting Thor’s arm like a battering ram until he slings it over her shoulders.

“Was this just a drop-by? Can I hear the secret story now?”

It’s three beers and two (2) full bags of gummy bears later, but by the time Thor is finished, Darcy is smiling almost as wistfully as he is.

“You do, objectively, have a face made for an eye patch. Nick Fury who? Long John Silver would never.”

Thor snorts around his beer. “Hela truly did me the favor of not having to gouge it out myself.”

Draining the last dregs from her bottle, Darcy leans forward suddenly, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face into his fever-warm skin.

“Thank you for coming to see me, buddy. I was on the ledge.”

His rubs his hand up and down her back before she pulls away. “For my friend, anything.” He bites the inside of his cheek only briefly before speaking again. “And what about you?”

Darcy’s mouth is already open to brush him off with a cavalier half truth, a joke at her expense, but it doesn’t come.

“I love Bruce.”

Thor goes very still mid-swallow of his drink. Darcy pries it from his hands and finishes it off for him. “Yeah. That about sums it up.”

“...After what happened, still?”

Darcy huffs. “Yeah. I thought the space would help — and, you know. Keep me alive. But...” She taps against her chest. “When I think about it, I pitter patter and all that bullshit. What a fucking bust.”

Thor hums, the sound in his wide chest like the motor of a small car. “For what it’s worth, he doesn’t enjoy my company either. The Hulk is fickle. But Banner is not.”

Darcy frowns at him, piecing his words together. “You’ve seen him already? He told you about the Other Guy hating me?”

He unwraps a Snickers bar and all but shoves it in his mouth whole.

Darcy chews the inside of her cheek so hard blood fills her mouth. “You know, you haven’t been a resident of Earth long enough to have fully absorbed the ‘bros before hoes’ mentality. Also, we were friends _first_.”

Thor puts both of his massive hands up in placation, but Darcy is on a roll.

“And he nearly _killed me_ , and he never even said _sorry,_ really. Did he tell you that? And I have been the _literal most chill human ever_ about all _my_ friends staying _friends_ with _him_ ! I gave them up so he wouldn’t have to, even though I did _nothing wrong_ ! So as far as I’m concerned, if I _want_ to know _anything_ about Robert Bruce Banner, at _any_ time and for _any reason_ , I am allowed that! He owes it to me!”

Her chest is heaving by the end of it, her insides all hollow and light feeling, like she’s been scoped clean.

“Also, ‘bros before hoes’ is sexist garbage and you should know better,” she finishes, shoving the last taquito in her mouth and chewing it like she were an animal ripping through gristle and carnage. Darcy feels, actually, exactly like that as Thor stares at her, mouth a little open in surprise.

“I’m sorry, Darcy. I thought you — I thought you wouldn’t want to know.”

Darcy narrows her eyes at him.

“...I also, perhaps, promised Banner that I would, ah. Keep some thoughts of mine in...confidence?”

She nearly feels a bit bad for Thor ( _nearly_ ), clearly swimming out of his depth here. She reminds herself that this isn’t his fault.

“Is he alright?” She asks after a very quiet pause. “Just. He’s not trying to — to hurt himself?”

Thor clears off some of the detritus from her bed before settling back against the pillows. Darcy is grateful to bury her splotchy, unmade face into his sweatshirt as he answers her, patting at her back idly.

“It’s not fair of me to say what Banner is feeling. But I. I’ve seen him much worse.”

“...I don’t know if that makes _me_ feel better or worse.” She pokes absently at the muscle of Thor’s stomach. “Does that make me a bad person, you reckon? By warrior space prince standards?”

“Is that what you think people are? All good or bad?”

“Philosopher king, kindly cut the shit.”

Thor sighs. “You asked if he was alright, no matter that he hurt you. No matter that he didn’t say sorry. I wouldn’t have done that.”

Darcy _harrumphs_ , but her heart is a little lighter. “Don’t pretend you aren’t decent.”

“And handsome,” he smirks. Darcy reaches up and pinches at his nose, twisting at it until they are both laughing from the expressions of mock-pain on his face.

“You know, I leave Midgard for five minutes to blow up my home and cause a rift in the galaxy, and I come back, and everything is terrible.”

“Mm. Rub it in, why don’t you?”

* * *

 

Thor leaves a little before three in the morning; Heimdall opens up a door right in the middle of her bathroom. (It is a parting gift to watch the God of Thunder seemingly step into a motel toilet.)

“Thanks again, for now. I’ll be cursing your name in a few hours when I have to go to work looking like a rat.”

“No spoons in your refrigerator?” He smiles easily.

“How do you know about that?”

Thor’s grin fixes in place. Behind him, the glowing portal seems to pulse a bit, as if impatient.

“I hope to see you again soon. Take care of yourself.” Thor kisses her temple and touches her easily; his arms are heavy when they hug her. His stubble scratches her skin; his mouth, even, is a jolt. He isn’t worried about hurting her in the least, and it makes Darcy’s chest twist. When was the last time she let someone touch her like this?

She squeezes his middle. Even if he didn’t answer her question, even if he wouldn’t give her everything she was looking for — hours later, still, and he had carefully talked around anything tangentially related to Bruce — he was there. He was giving her what he could, and Darcy was grateful for it.

“You too, Big Guy. Find me at a seedy motel anytime, we can make this a standing engagement.”

After he leaves, Darcy belly flops onto the warm, mussed comforter. It smells like the tingle of an exposed socket high in the back of her nose, and she buries her face in it.

It was right to leave the Remaining League of Super Friends. Darcy was safer under the radar now, but maybe she didn’t have to cut everyone out totally. Maybe she could have them as friends — maybe they would have _her_ as a friend — without being relegated to Smart Ass Sidekick or Comic Relief. She didn’t miss mortal danger, but she missed everything else about pre-London life. Maybe more than she was willing to admit, before Thor had nudged the door open for the _what-ifs_ to start slinking through.

What if she could have both? What if Darcy could have the things that she wants?

Thinking of Bruce still hurts, but before she succumbs to sleep and before she can talk herself out of it, she fishes her phone out from the folds of the comforter and presses send on her message from earlier.

Consequences were for Tomorrow Darcy.

* * *

 

Tomorrow Darcy hates Last Night Darcy.

She also hates Alex Jackson, who siddles up to her and stays there like a suction cup or a spur throughout the next cursed, miserable, no-good day. Darcy has smeared half of her remaining concealer under her eyes and on her newly spotty face, but she is very aware of looking exactly as hungover as she feels shuffling down the breakfast bar in the lobby of Sylvia’s hotel, where her first speaking engagement is scheduled.

Darcy smooths a hand down the wrinkled front of her blouse before adjusting her sunglasses. That wasn’t right. It was impossible to look exactly as hungover as she felt.

If that was a mercy or a burden, Darcy swallows another gulp of blisteringly hot coffee and tells herself she couldn't care less.

There was a read receipt on her text message to Bruce when she woke up, stamped an hour after she sent it. Maybe it was still the inky pre dawn when Bruce read it, wherever he was, and that’s why there hadn’t been a response.

Maybe, but probably not.

All around, her day was shaping up to be shit, and would likely remain shit. By 9:52 am, Darcy was absolutely sure of that, if nothing else.

“I noticed,” Alex begins softly, and Darcy grits her teeth, hating that she looks so obviously hungover that Alex is taking care to not make her headache worse, “that after the UPenn poll was released, there were some changes in the campaign.”

Darcy takes another deep inhale from her cup. _Serenity now. Serenity now._

“The poll showed a bigger gap than was expected between male and female voters, especially in their opinions on the WaPo article outing Sylvia as bisexual.” Alex munches on a piece of ripe, disgustingly fragrant melon. “That article also implied she was still in a relationship with someone on your team, though they couldn’t get a confirmed source on who. If you recall.”

If only she had a sledgehammer to bash her own head in for some real peace and quiet. “Ms. Rashid has been a vocal supporter of the LGBT community for years, and like she said after the article was published, we should be past outing people for clickbait.”

“The men overall pulled center-right of Sylvia, and after the results were published the staff and Sylvia both started dressing more conservatively, I noticed.”

Darcy snorts. “Yes, the suit jackets she had before the poll was released were hardly broadcast appropriate.”

“Can you comment on Trina DiMarco’s new policy regarding the campaign staff dress code? Are they expecting the race to be tight enough something like this will sway the outcome in your favor?”

She takes a very deep breath. For a moment, she considers looking over the rim of her sunglasses to drive her point home, but even the thought makes her eyes water and her head throb.

“This morning, Ms. Rashid is going to outline her plans to lower the taxes of families living under the poverty line to zero. After lunch we’re volunteering at Oakbridge Elementary School, which Senator Olberich has let fall into itself, refusing to sign on any additional funds or block grants until he gets his way with adding another million dollars in wasted spending on the military, running up the national deficit for his own vanity project. Twelve children have been injured since school began because of structural deterioration in the building.” Darcy wants to throw up, a little. Talking so much has left her dizzy and exhausted. Alex, however, looks delighted as Darcy takes a final deep breath before finishing in a dramatic huff: “And that is all I am willing and able to comment on. That’s all on the record. If you’ll excuse me.”

She does heave some acid off her stomach in the bathroom, which only helps a little. That was stupid of her. She doesn’t have the rank to put anything on the record on behalf of the campaign. This job was a bust, but Darcy doesn't want to fail. She fixes her lipstick in the smudged mirror and begrudgingly peels her sunglasses off to head to the conference room for Sylvia’s speech. She’ll fix this. She’ll figure it out.

Hopefully.

Despite her less than polite behavior, Alex still hovers close to Darcy until Sylvia has to go up to her room to make calls with donors and the press corps break for lunch. Seeing her long blonde hair shrink in the distance is a blessing, and it gives Darcy space to think and plan her way out of the mess her temper has inevitably landed her in.

Step one: get the fuck out of here.

When Darcy first started on the campaign, she made a point of purposefully shoving off the lowest-rung “bitchwork” to the unpaid interns. She’d paid her dues. She didn’t do coffee runs. But today, she volunteers to grab Trina and Sylvia lunch from the gyro place around the corner, stepping on another staffer’s toes pointedly when they make to offer instead. Darcy probably won’t be here much longer, anyway, so she doesn’t care about making enemies of her coworkers.

Out of the hotel and of sight from the staff and Alex, Darcy slips her soft, bendy flats from her purse and slides them on to walk to the store.

Alex can suck it. Trina can suck it. The UPenn pollsters can suck it. Men, generally, could suck it. It’s a litany that sets the rhythm to her pace as she stalks up the block.

Her phone buzzes not a second before she tries to cross the street, and Darcy nearly careens into traffic.

_“Thank you, Darcy.”_

What? What? What?

That’s...it? Darcy sees Bruce’s text bubble appear, disappear, and appear again several times before she can’t take it anymore.

_“Just say it, Bruce. I can’t bite you.”_

_“I was wondering when you would reach out.”_

Her stomach gives a squeeze like it’s under a Hulk-sized fist. Darcy closes her eyes, leant up against the front window of a little shoe store. She’s in Jersey, not in London. The Hulk isn’t here. Her ankle swells still in the rain and heels are more of a torture than before, but she’s healed. She’s whole. She lived.

_“You knew I would?”_

_“I figured you would.”_ A pause. _“Stay well.”_

That feels final. That feels like the bottom falling out, again.

Darcy is pretty sure she gets their orders wrong, but it doesn’t matter.

* * *

 

The hotel is on fire.

Darcy drops the bags, suctioning her back to the brick wall closest and digging in her purse for her taser, phone already pressed to her ear. Sylvia doesn’t pick up. Neither does Trina. There are screaming bodies everywhere in the street — how is Darcy supposed to know if they made it out? Should she check? Would Trina just bitch at her for wasting the nonexistent workers comp budget?

Her pulse is a hummingbird high in her throat, and even from this distance her eyes and mouth burn water with the acrid smoke pluming heavy in the air.

In her sweaty hand, her taser is a safety blanket hidden in her bag. She tries her best to breathe. People are still making their way out. The building is still standing. The police —

Darcy freezes. Where are the police? Had she heard or seen any sirens on her walk back over? Surely, with the fire the size that it is, someone has called 911 already.

Ducking in the little alley between the building and its neighbor, Darcy pulls her phone out again. The bars are all there. The battery is mostly full. She presses Trina’s name again on her call list and studies the screen.

The reception bars suddenly disappear. When the ringing comes, Darcy thinks something about it sounds off. Tinny, maybe, and far away. Maybe the pitch is wrong. Maybe she's just panicked and making things up to scare herself.

Maybe not.

“Shit, shit, _shit_.” What now? Her hands shake. Should she throw away her phone? She still has Bruce’s number in it — most of their numbers, some of them aren't even under fake names. If someone found it, that would be bad. But —

From behind her, Darcy hears a thud. Her back is so tight she thinks she might not ever be able to move past it.

She shoves the phone in her pants pocket, pulling her taser fully out of her purse as she turns around.

Nothing. Darcy huffs, adjusting the grip on her taser. She was such a baby. This stuff didn't happen to her anymore. She was fine, she just needed to start herding up her team members and do a count, then start rescheduling the rest of their day —

The air behind her shifts, and Darcy whirls to face it. Alex Jackson, soot faced and sweating, her blond hair a rat’s nest, stands in the alley with her hands up.

“Woah! Woah, Darcy, it's just me. Are you alright?”

Darcy shoves the taser back in her bag, pushing hair from her face.

“Fuck, I’m —  sorry. So sorry. Are you alright? What happened? My p—” she cuts herself off. Something nags at her. Alex was behind her. How did she get there? She’d had to have walked around the block to come up from the alley at its other end. Why would she have done that?

“Darcy?”

“Yeah, sorry, I'm just frazzled. Trina sounded nervous on the phone, and she's always so collected, it’s put me off.”

“Oh, were you able to get a hold of her? Is everyone okay? My phone hasn't been acting right since we broke for lunch.” Alex digs her phone out of her bag, poking at it for a moment before looking around Darcy’s shoulder, out onto the street. “Would you mind if I borrowed yours? So I can call my son?”

Darcy is probably being an unreasonable, paranoid, insensitive asshole. She doesn't care. Her neck prickles with sweat and goose flesh. “I'm sorry, it died as I was talking to her. That's why I'm waiting — I don't know where she said to meet. I figure this is a good place to crowd watch, without getting lost in it.”

“Yeah. Good place to hide.”

When was the last time Darcy took a full, deep breath?

“What?”

Alex smiles a bit. “It's scary! I wouldn't blame you.”

“Yeah.” She swallows. “But I guess we can't hide forever. Let's go out and see if we can help.”

Darcy waits to see if she will step forward, refusing to turn her back to Alex. She doesn't move.

“Come on. What's a journalist that doesn't want to be in the middle of a big story?”

“Not a journalist, I suppose. Not a good one.”

She reaches into her sensible black bag once more, and Darcy lunges. The taser is hardly charged before she jabs it at the juncture of Alex’s neck and shoulder. She seizes but Darcy doesn't release it until Alex is prone on the ground.

What now? What now?

Darcy grabs Alex’s bag, then digs in her pockets and takes everything in them blindly. She half kicks Alex behind the dumpster closest before hauling ass out of the alley and into the bustling crowd of the street.

The police sirens start to reach her ears as she turns the corner in the opposite direction of the gyro shop she'd just come from.

Darcy’s life _sucks_.

* * *

 

She’s on the train to New York before she realizes that’s where she’s heading. Does that mean she quit her job, then, officially?

Each jolt of the train feels like a bullet or a fist, and she can’t help from flinching under each of them. Darcy had turned her phone off before getting on the train, as well as the one Alex had in her bag, to try and buy herself some time in case there were GPS monitors already locked on them. Maybe she should just toss them, but something in her idiot brain stops her.

What if this was just a massive misunderstanding? What if she hurt an innocent woman in a fit of paranoia?

She finds a coffee shop on autopilot once off the train, sitting in the corner table with her back to the wall and a full view of the shop and the street outside its wide window. Her muffin tastes like ash. Darcy was hungry enough to go back for a second one regardless of its taste, but she only has so much cash on her and she doesn’t know how long she’s going to need to make it stretch before she dares risk using her card.

Tender stomach a little bit appeased, she starts examining the contents of Alex’s bag. She feels around the pockets and the lined sleeve for a bump or a ridge, some kind of tracking device. If there is one, she can’t find it. It’s not much comfort. Alex has countless pens and tubes of lipgloss as well as a small bag with tampons and eyeliner and a contact case with half a bottle of solution, but aside from some change at the bottom of her bag and a few folded receipts stuck together with bobby pins, she’s not got anything else but a notepad and her phone.

Darcy, perhaps, has fucked up.

Taking a deep breath, she flips through the notebook. Bulleted notes — a grocery list, notes on speaking points from Sylvia’s speeches. Darcy recognizes the topics listed underneath their respective dates. Her name isn’t anywhere in the book.

Her stomach is a grain of sand. Her stomach has its own gravitational pull.

The receipts are from the drugstore. Mini bottles of shampoo on one, nicotine gum and potato chips on the other.

At  this point, she almost  hopes to find “ALEX IS HYDRA,” stamped on her phone’s wallpaper.

The phone takes an eternity to turn back on, and when it asks for Alex’s passcode, Darcy nearly flings it out of  the window.

(Her background is of the ocean).

Darcy is so, so fucked.

When she turns her own phone on, there are seventeen missed calls from Trina, two voicemails from her, and countless other calls from unknown numbers.

Darcy slumps in her seat. No danger. Nothing to worry about except how to explain this whole mishap on her CV and to her next potential employer. She ambles up to the counter again, card in hand, for her second muffin.

As she waits in line, she turns to the television playing above the pastry display case. There’s footage of the hotel fire that Darcy forces herself to watch — she deserves to watch it, since she talked herself out of actually staying and helping. The least she can do is watch.

But then the video cuts away to cellphone footage of an alley. Smoke plumes in the background, and over the headline “RASHID STAFF MEMBER BRUTALLY ASSAULTS REPORTER,” Darcy watches herself tase Alex Jackson, kicking her prone body behind a dumpster before running off with her bag.

Slowly, Darcy walks back to her table, trying to look casual. She stuffs Alex’s bag into her mercifully larger one and marches out of the cafe.

Half of her remaining cash goes to a hoodie at least a size too small at the first bodega she passes. Her phone rings as she’s exiting onto the street, and she nearly screams. She forgot to turn them off — this is why she swore off that superhero shit.

She turns Alex’s phone off before reaching for hers, still buzzing insistently. If it’s Trina again...maybe she should just answer, and get it over with.

But it’s not Trina. It’s Bruce.

* * *

 

She doesn’t pick up the phone. He calls again. Darcy keeps walking, white knuckling around the plastic, glittery case in her hoodie pocket. He doesn’t stop until Darcy has walked three blocks and her nerves can’t take it anymore.

“H— hey.”

“What the fuck.”

Darcy stops even though she knows she should keep moving.

“Bruce?”

“What. The _fuck._ Are you doing?”

She bites her lip, frowning. “I’m debating if you’d call back, if I hung up on you. Don’t be an asshole to me today.”

Bruce takes a very deep breath. She can see him pacing — she imagines he’s back in his Avengers apartment. She hopes he is. “What are you doing, Darcy?”

“Walking,” Darcy grunts. “Wondering why you called.”

“You know why I called.”

“Oh, am I not supposed to be an idiot anymore?”

In her mind, she can see Bruce carding his fingers through his hair. He’s wearing the shapeless grey sweater they both loved — it was a contest, sometimes, to see who could get home and slip it on first.

Not that Darcy got to keep it on long, even if she won.

Especially if she won.

“Are you going to turn yourself into the police, Darcy?” He asks flatly.

“Hell _no_.” She scuffs the toe of her shoe on the ground. “She was a creep, anyway. I was protecting myself.”

“Darcy.”

“You know what would be nice?” She asks suddenly. Her eyes feel dry in the way that precedes a cry. The day — the past few days, the past few weeks — catch up with her all at once, and Darcy thinks, for a minute, her legs might give out under her. “You know what would be great, Bruce? If you and Tony got serious about that time machine in lab four. How much would I have to grease your palms with to make that happen?” A hysterical giggle claws up her throat. “I say I’d blow you for it, but —”

“Darcy.”

He doesn’t sound angry. He mostly sounds sad. Darcy burrows further into her sweatshirt, head ducked down as people pass her on the street, and listens to him breathe. It’s clear that he isn’t going to speak again, after a beat. Darcy doesn’t know what else to do but swallow past her thick throat and crack a joke.

“It’s one way to get your attention, right? Force the inevitable post-breakup run in.”

“Get my —” He cuts himself off with a groan.

“I’m an impatient girl, what can I say?”

Darcy is also a fool. After everything, she wants to inch her toes under Bruce’s thigh, sat on her old couch and eating Thai takeout. Just that, even, would probably hold her over. Just a little space to feel small and unbothered, taken care of, before she has to go back and fix the mess she’s made.

There’s a beep in the call, and Darcy pulls the phone away from her face to see Jane’s name flash on the screen.

“That’s Jane....” she sighs, thunking her head back against the shopfront she’s leaning on. “Can’t catch a break today.”

“Do you have somewhere safe to stay tonight?”

Her chest clenches.

 _Do you care_?

But that’s not fair. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t ask. He wouldn’t have called. He wouldn’t have told Thor about the spoons in the fridge.

From the corner of her eye, Darcy sees a flash of something shiny. She looks up to it reflexively and barely stops herself from breaking into a sprint. A suit holds a badge aloft and makes a bee line for her from the corner of the block.

“Oh, shit! Bruce, motherfucker, shit, fuck I —”

Quicker than Bruce can respond, the suit is in front of her. He clears his throat pointedly, looking to the phone. “Ma’am. I’m going to need you to come with me, please.”

There is no way Alex has pressed charges already. Darcy squints at the badge still held aloft in his hand. The seal stamped on it reads ‘Department of Defense.’

Mother _fucker_.

“What? What? You’re not the — the police?”

“What is going on?” Bruce’s voice is urgent on the other end of the line.

Oh, god. Defense — _Ross_ — if they take her phone, they can find Bruce, they can connect her to anything they want. They could make it proof of anything.

“Hey, sorry, uh. Sorry, _Robert_ ,” she breathes into the phone. “Gotta hang up now. I — my suited friend needs my full attention, apparently.” She smiles at the suit. “That’s rude, sorry, but I don’t know your name. Are you a _Ross_ ? You look like a _Ross_.” It probably just sounds like she’s having a stroke, and not being helpful at all. She is wasting time, either way. There’s noise from the other end of the line, but Darcy doesn’t really hear it. “Anyway. Not going to be able to call you back for a while, Robert.”  The suit looks at her impatiently, and she thinks he’s about to reach for the phone. “Take care. I— take care.”

She hangs up, shoving the phone into her hoodie pocket. The suit doesn’t want a scene, that much is clear. She can’t outrun him, probably, but she needs to ditch her phone sooner rather than later, and on the sly.

“Am I being arrested, sir?”

“No ma’am. We just want to ask you some questions.”

Liar.

“So, I don’t _have_ to go with you?”

His face gets tight, and Darcy makes a run for it. She trips over her legs turning her phone off, skidding into an alley and flinging it into a gutter where it lands with a distant, watery _plunk_. In a fit of inspiration as she comes out of the mouth of the alley and onto the street, she scrambles to put Alex’s phone in her hoodie pocket.

The suit is close behind her, and she makes a show of wrenching her hoodie off and throwing it off behind a newspaper stand as another suit steps smoothly in front of her. Darcy slams into their solid — _vested_ — chest at full velocity, her nose smarting as she pulls back.

“Do you think I’m going to shoot you?” Darcy marvels weakly, looking down at the outline of the kevlar underneath their suit shirt.

The other suit comes to a panting stop behind them, Darcy’s jacket in hand. Alex’s phone peeks out of the pocket. It probably won’t even matter.

A nondescript black SUV pulls up to them, and the suits guide her in it with little effort. Underneath a ringing numbness, Darcy thinks she should be fighting back more.

The car is very cool inside, cleaner than a showroom model. Two suits are in the front seat, which including the two sandwiching her in the back, is four too many to tray and wrangle her. Excessive. She’s tempted to ask how much operations like these run up government spending, but the woman in the passenger’s seat up front turns around before she manages.

Her dark hair has a few strands of grey up front, her cheeks high and narrow between its curtain. She extends a hand to Darcy, her eyes blue as the very deep ocean, very steady.

“Betty Ross. Pleasure to finally meet you.”

Darcy barely turns her head to the right before heaving into the suit’s lap.


	3. Reunions

03\. Reunions

  
Betty wears a very delicate gold chain around her neck with an enamel evil eye hanging off from it. It is not even the most surprising thing that Darcy can’t help but catalog as they drive her to a laughably mundane looking office building forty five minutes out from where they took her. Betty’s short nails are painted a poppy pink, she has a gun tucked under her well cut jacket. Darcy would bet her shoes are more in line with what Pepper would wear than Jane. She was very gracious about the puke thing. She hums as they turn the last corner into the parking garage, utterly unbothered. Darcy cannot figure her out.

Only two of the suits lead her by the arm out of the parking garage and into the building itself, following the neat clicks of Betty’s low-heeled but lovely shoes. She doesn’t walk like they hurt her feet at all, and Darcy feels a small but undeniable twinge of something ugly in her belly. Despite herself, she feels young and sloppy and foolish and small in the very worst ways of each.

They are seemingly the only occupants in the building. There is hardly even the distant hum of the A/C unit droning overhead as they pass by identical empty offices to reach one near the very end of the hall on the third floor. It is only furnished with a semicircle of folding chairs opposite a single one, its back to the large window.

“Please, sit.” Betty waves Darcy to the single chair, taking the one opposite her in the semicircle. One of the agents joins her, at her right, while the other waits at the door. It’s silent for a long moment before Darcy hears the soft click of footsteps down the hall. Betty is engrossed in her phone and hardly looks away from it as Alex Jackson crosses through the doorway, her face just starting to bruise.

“You are _fucking shitting me_.”

Betty finally deigns to look up at Darcy’s outburst, nodding curtly at Alex as she puts her phone away. Alex takes the remaining seat next to Betty, impassively sizing Darcy up.

Betty clears her throat. “Right. Well, Darcy, I’m sure this isn’t fun for you. We’ll get it over with quickly. When was the last time you spoke with Bruce?”

Darcy digs her fingers into her thighs before catching herself, instead tucking them underneath her legs. She won’t say anything. That’s the best plan she can come up with, right now, and it will have to do.

Betty’s face gets a little softer. “Darcy. Do you think we want to hurt him? I know you know who I am. What we — what we were.”

Darcy mashes her lips together. _Say nothing. Say nothing._ How many times had Bruce asked her for that, in some measure or another? It’s almost like it was practice for this all along.

_No_. No, that’s not right. She’s romanticizing it. But it helps, a little, so she keeps on. When was the last time he’d asked? Before London, while he slotted their clothed bodies together on his bed. He wedged a knee between her legs and buried his face in her hair and they laid there, quiet, until the pizza came. She sat at his feet and focused on making as little noise as possible as she chewed. He didn’t ask her to, but she knew he noticed. He braided her hair once he finished eating, and it was so knotted the next day it took her thirty minutes and all of her leave in conditioner to brush it out. She was in tears by the end of it, not bothering to hide her sniffles as he stepped out from the shower, towel slung low at his hips. He kissed her red cheek and offered to braid it again before they went down to the lab.

She said no, but let him twist it up in a bun. Even as it fell and grew loose over the course of the day, she knew better than to touch it.

Betty clears her throat, and Darcy loses the thread of comfort the memory gave her.

“We’ve made headway with the antidote. He won’t speak to me since London —”

She nearly cracks, there, feels the words bubble up like marbles that rest just behind her teeth.

Antidote? _Antidote_?

“—But this is _for_ Bruce, Darcy. I know he’s given up on getting his life back, but I wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t give him this choice, now that we have it.”

Darcy has run through all the memories and imagined scenarios where Bruce asked for her silence and stillness like they were set on fast forward and she’s now at the end of the tape and her resolve with it.

‘ _Getting his life back_ ’ Darcy’s _ass_.

So much for _say nothing_.

“Bruce has already _chosen_.” She glares at Alex. “Also, I don’t feel bad about tazing you anymore. Just so we’re all clear. This is super shitty of you.”

“You think you get to leave from underneath Stark’s wing without a second glance?” Alex asks, not even unkindly.

Darcy bites down a scream. She’s not an idiot, and she won’t be treated like one by any of them. She had been careful. Careful and discreet, and still she was here. Her throat is a tight clench like a not-Bruce hand having a squeeze. Bruce was smart. What would Bruce do? _Don’t get emotional. Be cold. You don’t know anything._ It wouldn’t even be a lie.

She rolls her eyes and tries to appear unbothered before turning back to Betty. Cold bravado. She can do this.

“You and your Dad made up, then?” Betty stiffens in her chair under Darcy’s flat glare. If Bruce ever asked Betty to do the weird shit he was into, Darcy is honestly unsure if Betty would have ever even tried it. “Got a cushy suit job. Distinctly unscientific. Pays better though, yeah? Retirement and pensions and shit.”

“You don’t know what I’ve done for Bruce,” Betty says quietly. “I only want him well.”

She doesn’t deign that with an answer. “You wasted some taxpayer money then here, Betts. I haven’t seen Bruce in months. Don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Fuck you,” Darcy spits before she can stop herself. “You stalk me at my fucking job and steal me off of the fucking street and ask me shit about my ex who fucking _beat_ me — put me in the _hospital_ — and then you call me a liar? You didn’t seem to want much to do with Bruce after what he did to you, I don’t know why you thought I was dumb enough to, either!”

Betty is very quiet, her expression stony.

“You are smart, Darcy, I believe that,” she says finally, leaning forward in her chair. It shows the grip of her gun at her hip in the process. “He isn’t interested in anyone that can’t keep up with him. That’s why he was such a terrible teacher.” Betty clears her throat, leaning back and looking vaguely embarrassed. Good. “Anyway. Knowing that I know how smart you are — and you knowing how smart I am — let’s try this one more time, before we have to go to the General.”

Darcy’s insides are a gnawing churn. Bravado. Cold. Unbothered.  “You call your dad the General?”

“Fine, if you want to do it the hard way —”

“If you cared about him, if you ever did, you’d leave him be. You wouldn’t be working with your dad. So I don’t care if you believe me or not, I don’t know anything. I don’t care who you parade in here, that’s not changing.”

“And you wouldn’t tell us if you did,” Betty sighs, pinching between her eyebrows.

“Neither here nor there, lady.”

The air around them shifts perceptibly, though no one moves. Darcy thinks the room feels fuller, but she doesn’t get much further than that before General Ross steps through the doorway.

Darcy’s vision bleeds black on the outsides, and she’s out of the chair and on her feet before she realizes she’s made the decision to do so.

Ross hardly looks at Betty before zeroing in on Darcy, his expression utterly unimpressed.

“No luck, hm? I told you, Betty, these types won’t budge.”

He’s trying to rile her up. Deep down, Darcy knows it. But it’s working.

Everything is _all his fault._

Ross makes a show of looking her up and down, and for a long minute they both just stare at each other.

_If I had a Hulk of my own, I’d kill you._

“It’s your civic duty to report threats to national security. Are you denying that duty now, Lewis?”

_If they had enough to charge you with something, you’d be in an actual DOD office. You’d have been processed already. They have nothing. They’re desperate, they’re showing their hand. Be still. Be calm. Say nothing. Say nothing._

He groans after her silence drags on a beat, pulling his phone out and tapping something out roughly. “Here I thought I was done seeing that moony eyed shit. Whatever it is about Banner that leaves reasonable girls soft and stupid, it really can’t be worth this.”

Betty might shift in her seat, but she doesn’t rebuke her father. Darcy has just proclaimed her innocence and defending Bruce now won’t help her case, but it’s hard to restrain herself. Blood fills the spaces between her teeth as she chews her cheek and keeps quiet, pretending like Bruce has asked her to do so just because he knows it’s a hard thing for her to do.

Ross raises a cool eyebrow as he pockets his phone. “Let me be honest here, I’m surprised. Everything we knew about you showed you couldn’t keep your mouth shut — yet here you are, stone cold.”

_If I could kill you, I’d do it. I know I would._

“If you thought I had any real dirt on Bruce, you’d have come to me before now.” Darcy juts her chin out and flops back into the chair.

_Then again,_ a small voice chides her, _if this isn’t an official DOD job, what’s to stop them from putting a bullet in you now?_

Helpful as that train of thought is, she shoves it away.

“You know, you wanted to work for me, once, Lewis.”

Darcy sneers at him. “What, you found my first PoliSci 101 essay and think you have some leverage here?”

“A job like the one I can offer you isn’t anything to turn your nose up at. People much more qualified than you foam at the mouth for it.”

“You staff your team with people you know are underqualified?”

“I staff my team based on loyalty to me. Though it doesn’t hurt, if they know who the smartest person in the room is.”

Darcy gapes at him, and it’s not even faked even a little. “Even I thought you — well, _shit_ , Bob, guess that’s why you fucked up so bad with that Raft business, hm? Bunch of idiots holding super-weirdos in a big canoe was bound to end FUBAR. Heard they gave that project to someone else — maybe they staff _their_ teams with more than yes people and folks you bribe to heel.”

His jaw clenches, and Darcy lets herself savor the small, brief victory.

“I was hoping you’d at least call your Asgardian dog out by now. Are you on the outs with him too?”

_You can’t think I’m so stupid to get Thor involved. You can’t think I’m so weak I can’t handle this on my own. You aren’t so scary._

— _Say nothing, say nothing_ —

“This is taking much longer than I thought it would,” Alex hums, leaning back in her chair so its front two legs are poised in midair. “By now, anyway, I thought we would have been all wrapped up.”

“He’s deciding if he’s going to come or not,” Betty murmurs, not having the decency to look Darcy in the eye as she picks a stray hair off of her dark trousers.

The bottom drops out of Darcy’s stomach, and her anchor with it. She was a fool, after all.

Fuck what they thought Darcy knew. They didn’t care about any of it — she was _bait_.

“He won’t,” Darcy begins, voice rough. “Look, he won’t come for me, if that’s what this is about. We’re all wasting each other’s time.”

“Banner came for Betty after years apart, just for a threat he couldn’t confirm. He’ll come for you after the crumbs we left.”

Panic builds up in her throat and pushes the lies out, heavy and fast as a landslide. “We haven’t spoken in months, I told him I hated him, I never wanted to see him again —”

“ _Now_ she can’t shut up,” Ross groans. “Jackson, your unit is ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Jackson nods,rising to her feet. “They should have tracked our phone signals by now. Given where we had Banner pinned last, he should be here soon. We weren’t being subtle.”

“He _won’t come_.”

Ross snaps his fingers and the two nameless suits flank her, nearly touching but not. “It will make it harder for Banner if he finds you sedated, Lewis.”

“So what happens, then? If he comes or not, what happens to me?”

From the floor below, a muffled shout. All her insides are compressed tight and cold, an ice cube in the gaping emptiness that used to be her body. If they both live through this, Bruce should hope Darcy isn’t able to get ahold of him. _The utter fool_.

“And they say romance is dead,” Ross drawls. He jerks his chin towards the suits at her sides, and one of them wrangles her to the floor before she has the chance to even really fight back. Above her, the other suit cocks their gun, aimed at her head.

Bruce is trembling and jaundiced in the doorway, and that, more than the gun or the weight of the agent’s body pinning her to the floor, makes her eyes well up. His hair is short, barely showing its curl, his stubbled jaw more silver than Darcy remembered.

“You _fucking idiot_ ,” she groans. The agent presses forward so her arms pinned more cruelly behind her back, pushing her face into the scratchy carpet. “Just _go_ —”

“Bruce,” Betty breathes, taking a half step forward. “You look — I’m so glad to see you, Bruce.”

Darcy will kill her too, if Alex Jackson doesn’t beat her to the punch. Two and a half paces behind Betty, she raises her gun in a swift, practiced motion, and points it at the back of Betty’s shiny hair.

Betty freezes, her hands raised out in front of her — the gun at her side was for show, then. A scientist with just more decoration than most. A puppet. A woman who loved Bruce, and only a Suit by default.

“What is this, Dad?”

Ross doesn’t look at her. Aside from a glance up when Alex first cocked her gun, Bruce doesn’t either. Darcy’s neck is an aching, throbbing protest as she tries to hold her head up to look him in the eye.

“Keep your shit together,” Darcy wheezes. “You fucking keep it together, or _I’m_ going to be the angry one, Bruce.”

_If I see the Hulk again, I won’t live through it._

“Is this where we bargain, Ross?” Bruce rasps. He doesn’t look away from Darcy, who refuses to shift her position to relieve the pain in her neck and shoulders, much less hide the tears now slipping free down her cheeks.

“As a matter of fact, it is not. We’re going back to fix the shit I’ve made. The Hulk makes an appearance in the process, I kill them both.”

“This isn’t what we agreed,” Betty seethes, her cheeks splotchy and her eyes wet. Of course it isn’t, but Betty must just be book smart and sense dumb. Darcy can’t manage to not hold that against her, because what kind of fucking idiot trusts Ross?

She pulls her gun out of it’s holster, aims it unsteadily at her father. “I can’t believe I ever —”

Betty fires before finishing her sentence, but Ross is unmoved.

A blank. Betty’s face crumples. Darcy feels bad for her only because that was probably her only way out of this shitstorm, and Betty and Ross found a way to fuck that up.

Alex Jackson steps forward, ramming the butt of her gun to Betty’s temple. She crumples to the floor with a graceless thunk. Bruce’s lips have gone white. The veins in his neck are swelling, his whole body twitching erratically.

Darcy is fucked, she is _fucked_ , even before the unforgiving muzzle presses against the back of her hair. She can’t bite down a little wail, thrashing against the agent’s hold.

There’s a jolt like the earth being cleaved in two that takes her body with it, followed by a burn that smolders to blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Sorry this ends on a downer. It felt like a natural ending point...for what it's worth, I've got another tiny interlude chapter going up immediately after this. :)
> 
> Feedback is always appreciated!


	4. Interlude

* * *

04\. Interlude

Bruce loves Darcy in private. Bruce loves Darcy when she doesn’t return the sentiment, when he can’t ruin her, and here, now, he loves her on his knees at her bedside, in between the beeps of the monitors above her. 

Bruce loves her enough to not touch, anymore. (Even if he could.) Bruce loves her enough for restraint. 

There’s a beep down the hall, and Bruce takes several deep breaths before the door at its end opens. The shackles on his ankles rattle as he rises to his feet, tearing his eyes away from the glass partition Darcy lays behind. Both cuffs are fitted with needles that pump him with a steady stream of whatever concoction Ross has convinced himself will work on keeping Bruce human, same as the ones on his wrists. Ross isn’t as smart as Bruce, and undoubtedly this unsuccessful brew will only lower his white blood count for as long as his body takes to fight it off or raise his blood pressure until the Hulk takes the wheel.

He looks again at Darcy as Ross approaches the glass wall of his enclosure. No Hulk. That’s not an option.

Ross hums Louis Armstrong as he approaches the glass, a rolled up newspaper folded under his arm.

“Let’s begin, then.”

* * *

 

In the lab, at first, Bruce is selfish just to look at her. Bruce knows better. Her hands are soft and small when she hands him things, her hair smells of sugared citrus when she passes by close enough to gift him the passing scent. All her smiles look like she means them, and the knitted coaster she made him for Christmas was both tasteful and well made. Darcy isn’t so stupid to be unafraid of the things around her, but she’s brave to stick around regardless. She’s off limits for a hundred more reasons besides these.

He’s content to look only sometimes and chide himself for wanting to look the rest, until she starts looking back. 

...Bruce has learned to be harmless, when it counts. Bruce has fashioned a shock collar of sorts on his own, can get close to imagining a _what if_ that doesn’t require her participation. He can do the doing and take that burden away from her, if nothing else. That's penance for entertaining inevitable disaster. That’s safe. Most of the time when he touches her, having moved past the point where looking is enough, she’s safe.

She’s safe when she sprawls out on his desk, safe later in her apartment, trembling underneath him and flushed pink and bared up to him in ways he doesn’t deserve to see. She’s safe until The Hulk connects the dots — when Darcy is around and Bruce smells sweet orange he clamps down on the Hulk, even when the Hulk is quiet. (And the Hulk had only just begun to be quiet, sometimes.) But Bruce is scared and Bruce won’t take chances, and he keeps pushing the Hulk back in the deepest corner he can find as Darcy gets closer.

Then the bomb goes off, and Stark can’t not drag other people into his shit. Then she drops one of her own, white knuckled fists bunching up his bedsheets because she knows better than to touch without asking, anymore. She’s smart. She’s smart and lovely and his, she offers, if he’d accept.

If he accepts, which — did he ever get around to that? Surely she understood that he did. 

(The Hulk had howled when she said it, but Bruce pushed him back, kissed the knobby swell of her knee and counted each breath in of her skin as a victory.)

And Bruce was aware they couldn’t be “normal” about it. But if he couldn’t put his hand on her lower back while they worked in the lab or kiss her cheek when she left his apartment, her eyelashes getting stuck together in the rain because she didn’t believe in umbrellas, he could leave a bruise the exact cast of his thumb on the inside of her elbow and it would be enough. He could make that enough. A mark of possession, something indulgent and reckless. A planned hurt is the same as a casual affection, if not better. She had a scar on her collarbone because he wanted it there, something to look at when he couldn’t touch, a way to remember his hands had been there before and that her skin cut soft and easy where he wanted it to. The seam appeared so quickly for a second Bruce thought it had always been there — but it hadn’t been. Bruce had done it. Darcy let him.

She was safe even as he swabbed her skin with iodine, then after with peroxide, then when he bandaged her up. She was safe with his boot on the squidgy swell of her belly, safe with her face buried in his carpet, safe when he used a swab of rubbing alcohol and traced nonsense on her back before taking a long-stemmed match to it.

Darcy isn’t safe now. Darcy hasn’t been safe since London. Maybe she won’t be again. All of which is his fault, of course, and that makes it a little easier to take the cattle prod when it comes again, this time at his left thigh. Ross observes him coolly behind the glass divider as his goons in ridiculous HAZMAT suits test the limits of their ‘antidote.’ The scorched skin on his leg itches with healing already, and Ross’s mouth tightens to a thin white line. The Hulk is a constant roar in his ears, a pressure at the base of his skull like an aneurysm, but Bruce has earned it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :) Thanks for reading! Feedback is appreciated more than I can say. I've also got a playlist for this fic/series if anyone is interested in it or new jams. You can listen [ here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kddavis1121/playlist/5MiMeATa5ekJgnrVQunq2p?si=YPGCvGpTSoWPgTDeeKTmZw)!


	5. 05.

05.

Darcy’s dreams are metaphors, or something. She sees Bruce wrapped up in cuffs and, once, a straight jacket behind a glass partition. He looks sad when he looks like anything at all. In the dreams it’s her fault he is bound up, so that, at least, is understandable.

He rests his forehead against the glass so it goes smooth, all the little wrinkles she liked to imagine tracing over disappearing. If her subconscious were less of an asshole, her dreams would let her finally touch him like she wasn’t worried about it. She thinks she’d make faces in the glass, fogging it with her breath and drawing little obscenities in the condensation until Bruce either cheered up or gave her a roughing up one, the glass melting away in the dream so she could find peace in sleep, if nothing else.

But that doesn’t happen. Instead, when the strangers come in and look down at her from where she’s laid flat, Bruce will sometimes kick against the glass. That’s all the interaction her brain will give her.

What an  _ asshat. _

Darcy licks at her dry lips. Everything is removed from her — the sights don’t mean anything in her jelly feeling brain, the sounds only reach her in their vibrations, no noise, there’s no feeling in any of her body. The sheets aren’t cool on her skin, there’s no thudding answer when she tries to drum her fingers against the bed rail. Even her thoughts, when they come, run like smoke through her hands that take try and try and try again to parse through. 

“Darce.”

If she tries very hard, she can open her eyes, now. She is dreaming sometimes even still, when they aren’t closed. But now she’s not. She refuses.

“Darcy.”

“M— m—”

_ I can’t move _ .

“Shh. It’s— I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m sorry, you usually don’t answer.”

Her mouth won’t open, and her little scream is muffled behind the seam of her lips.  _ She what _ ?

“No, I’m sorry. Breathe with me, Darcy, you’re fine. Can you look at me? Let me see you.”

Bruce is stood pressed close to the glass. He has a beard. He looks whole, even if his clothes are torn and dirty. He was asking very nicely. Maybe this was a dream.

“Are you with me?”

_ I can’t move _ ! She tries again, but nothing. Bruce gulps, hands pressed to the partition.

“I kn— it’s hard, I know. They’re keeping you sedated. Lots of it. But you’re fine. I wouldn’t let them h—” 

Bruce presses his forehead to the glass. For a minute, Darcy thinks she sees something green under his skin.

“What do you need, Darcy?”

“T— m…” She tries to swallow. It’s an eternity to speak again, but Bruce waits. “Tal...talk. M-me,” she slurs.

_ Keep me awake. Let me fight this off.  _

He doesn’t, at first. This is definitely real, if he’s not giving her what she wants.

“It’s been thirteen days. Your shoulder is healing better than it should. You’ll probably need physical therapy to get the full movement back, but you — it was careful, how they…” He trails off. She thinks she hears him breath in, ragged and loud. “I am sorry.”

Maybe she is dreaming. How many apologies were they on now? 

“I am so — so sorry. I knew better than to ever get involved with you.”

Darcy chokes on the air in her throat. 

“F-fuck y-y-you,” she manages. 

“I will get you out once you’re able to move. I want you to finish this round of antibiotics and we will leave— I’ll make sure you can leave, I mean. I promise.”

“Al— a-alone?”   


What good had being alone done her?  

“Of course.”

_How dare you_ _say that to me now, after everything._

The door opens to her left, and if Darcy could, she’d throw something at Bruce. He puts his finger to his lips briefly as if she doesn’t already know to stay quiet. She closes her eyes as they step closer, leaving only little slits to see through. It makes it even harder to stay awake, but as soon as her sheets are pulled down consciousness becomes much easier. The drugs keep her from flinching away as she gets sponged down. The water they bathe her in is criminally cold, the soap acrid smelling, leaving her skin parched tight and dry. 

There’s a rumbling that takes Darcy long moments to recognize as Bruce. The sponge finishes her arms and neck, dipping down the front of her gown to her chest only perfunctorily, before she feels it again at her legs. Her feet, her shins. Heat pricks at the corner of her eyes. Up past her knees and to the tops of her thighs. 

“Enough,” Bruce snaps. 

“It’s a bath, Dr. Banner. I’m a medical professional. You don’t need to be dramatic.”

“Ross is doing this on purpose —”

“You could always not watch,” the cool, neutral voice offers. “Tilly, help me roll her up so I can get her back.”

Darcy nearly vomits as the sponge washes off under her gown, then the line of her back. They take her temperature and blood pressure and hook a new IV drip up beside her while Darcy wills down bile and the churning heat in her gut that doesn’t settle even after they have long left the room.

“Talk to me, please, Darce.” 

The drugs are already pulling at her. “They — that. Every day?”

“...Yes.”

She swallows thickly. Her head is a dry, thudding ache. “You watch?”

“I don’t trust them.”

Dacy manages a few real tears there. How was she ever supposed to get out if they kept pumping her with drugs? What were they filling her with? What if it was more than a sedative — people got hooked on heroin and shit like this, oh, god —

“Darcy, take a breath, they’ll come back if they hear you. They’ve never — I would have killed them already, if they had done anything like —”

“Sh-shut  _ up _ ,” Darcy gurgles. Her face is wet and her nose running. She wishes more than anything to just be able to wipe at it herself. Bruce pities her, which is bullshit, and he falls silent. Darcy falls under the blackness quicker than a blink, thinking vaguely about what would happen if she didn’t wake up for a while.

* * *

 

This is a dream.

This is a dream.

This is a dream.

Darcy rolls her hips forward languidly, the stretching fullness a delicious pleasure. It rolls like a tide up her back, down her legs. She nuzzles down underneath Bruce’s jaw, kissing her way up to his open mouth. He entertains her for a moment, soft and easy like their rhythm below, before taking her hair in a gentle fist and pulling her back with care. At first, she thinks, just to look at her. It’s not bad. She enjoys looking down at him like they are; the flushed cheeks, the wild hair, the chest heaving up with his labored breathing. He has red claw marks from her own fingers poking through the dark hair there. Yes, she decides. It’s good. Bruce can look at her the same way, too.

Adjusting her balance, she gives another, firmer grind, a smile on her face that she means more than anything.

He clocks her squarely in the jaw, closed fist, enough strength to hear the cracking pop of bone underneath her fevered skin. 

This is a dream.

This is a dream.

Darcy raises her own fist, laughing, and she hits him back.

* * *

 

They move her bed. It’s closer to the partition, not against the wall opposite anymore. It’s at an incline so Darcy can see Bruce clearly.

They have finished another bath. It was worse than last time, because she was more awake for it, but they’re gone now. It’s just Darcy and Bruce.

“ _ Hey _ . Awake,” Darcy grunts, her throat unbearably dry and thick.

“They’re giving you less of the sedatives,” Bruce nods, brow all tight knots. 

“Bad?”

Bruce might shrug, but he doesn’t answer. His face is all mottled purple today, his left hand nearly black with bruising. Darcy licks her lips.

“Dreamt ‘bout you.”

“Did you kill me in it?” He offers with a little humorless snort.

Darcy would laugh, if she could. “Fucked you in it.” 

The cuffs on his ankles and wrists make a jolting rattle as Bruce gapes up at her, falling back a step.

“How could you even want to  _ touch  _ me —”

“Hit you in it, too.” 

She tries for a smile. It’s still too far to catch her reflection in the glass to see if she manages. 

Bruce thunks his head against the partition. “Yeah. You practice while you can. You can hit me all you want later.”

The door  _ clicks _ to her right, and two lab coats walk back through before Darcy can squeeze her eyes shut.

“You’re up!” The man is blonde and thin, his young face fresh from grad school. “That’s good, that’s good.”

“Waking you would have taken a while. Let’s see if you can keep some food down.” The woman has beautiful red hair down to her waist, pulled back in a shiny ponytail. Her voice is familiar. Her hands, when they settle a tray around her lap, are recognizable when Darcy pictures a sponge in them.

Her stomach gives a violent twist. She has never wanted to eat less. 

“No,” she grunts.

They both pause. 

“It will be easier if we don’t have to do this using a tube,” the familiar woman says evenly. 

“Don’t,” Bruce growls. They ignore him. The woman picks up the plastic spork beside a goop that could be oatmeal on the tray, while the man busies himself with a chart and the beeping machines beside Darcy.

“ _ No _ ,” Darcy says again, jerking away. They were touching her too much, in her space, suffocating —

"I can feed myself!” She shrieks, and the room is still. Her head is thumping, her vision suddenly, painfully clear. All of the blood that had been still and settled with the drugs in her belly has risen up to her brain again, and for a moment every neuron with its home there seems to fire off at once, a little nuclear fission behind her eyelids, hardly contained in the fragile egg cup of her skull.

“You’re spry, considering,” the man hums. His eyes are bright with a  _ science! _ -y interest Darcy hasn’t seen since leaving Jane in London. “That’s unexpected.”

The woman abandons the spork, producing a penlight out of her jacket pocket and pulling at Darcy’s eyelids to attack her retinas with it’s criminally bright light. 

“How did you burn everything off so quickly, hm?” She ponders aloud, as if Darcy could answer. It’s not like she could run a marathon as she was. Had they pumped her with so much shit that coherency was supposed to be impossible?

She tries to look at Bruce, white lipped and still behind the glass. His eyes are focused mid-distance, and he’s wearing his problem solving face. Apparently so, then. Darcy does her best to act even more sluggish than she truthfully feels, hoping to throw them off.

“Let’s change your dressing and get a peek. Can you lean up for me?” The woman looks at her expectantly. Darcy only rewards her a blank stare.

Tutting, she jerks her chin towards the other doctor, and together they maneuver her forward so they can peel the bandaging off of her shoulder. The gauze wraps nearly up her neck, the shots a caricature of vampire teeth she can see out of her periphery. One clean through her shoulder, the other a few inches up, a little above her collar bone. Bruce looks like he’s going to vomit as soon as they pull the strings of her gown loose, much less when the injury is opened to the cool, recycled air of her room. But Darcy doesn’t look away from him, too afraid to see and have this made any more real than it has to be. Dread pools in her gut heavier than the drugs ever were when one of the doctors inhales sharply beside her, and Bruce’s face drains of all color behind the partition. 

She won’t ask. She won’t say anything. They change the dressing almost gingerly before leaving the room, quick and sudden as they came, without another word to her. The smell of the oatmeal still on her lap makes Darcy’s stomach churn.

“Is it...bad, Doc?”

He swallows thickly, sliding down the wall they share that faces their doors. He  _ thunks  _ his head a few times against the glass when he’s fully seated. Darcy recognizes it as another tic, the rhythm of a repetitive motion helping him work through a conundrum.

“You’re healing pretty fast,” he says eventually.

Darcy  _ hm _ s low in her throat, lethargic now that her outburst had drained most of her energy. 

_ Was that supposed to be a bad thing _ ?

* * *

 

Days pass. The drugs come, the baths come, the doctors come. She eats only when she feels like she’d die if she didn’t. As time goes on, that becomes more frequent. Her appetite is ravenous, to the  _ science _ -y delight of the doctors involved. 

The downside to healing, of course, is that she can’t sleep through her humiliation any longer. She watches the partition like she could develop laser eyes and burn through it when they take Bruce away for hours at a time, returning him stumbling and beaten and breathing heavily. 

She passes wakefulness imagining what she would do in Bruce’s shoes. If she had a Hulk, she thinks, in the closest approximation of glee she’d experienced in weeks if not months, she’d burn this place down after tearing through its halls, smashing everything in her wake. She imagines holding Ross by the ankle over the flames to roast like a pig. It’s a savage, delicious thought to hold on to.

* * *

 

Darcy can’t sleep. 

The room is dark, and Bruce is breathing softly in his room. Darcy can’t remember when she started to hear it, but it’s impossible to ignore now.

She is  _ awake _ . The darkness in the room is punctuated by the sharp glares of the hall lights on the metal machines and their beeping LED displays. Everything is loud and bright. Her breathing rasps at her own ears, and she is sure something is wrong. The colors are oversaturated. The smells from the room — even, she suspects, from the hall — are unbearable. 

Too much. The drugs had left her feeling like everything was padded in thick, cottony stuffing, but she’d take that to now. Awake. Too awake.

“I can hear you blink, maybe.”

Bruce takes a minute to answer. Darcy thinks he’d been close to dozing. His breathing was slowing down, getting deeper. But if she can’t sleep, he won’t either.

“...Can you move?” He asks thickly.

She flexes her toes. Easy. She dares to lift her leg up, bending her knee. Easy. Her arms are heavy, and she’s wary of jostling all the needles attached to her there, but she can do it.

“I think so.” 

Bruce studies her. There’s a glare on the glass that, combined with his beard, makes him look like a stranger. She squashes down the tendril of fear in her belly. He’s Bruce. Still Bruce. She knows that.

“We could go,” she croaks. 

“This is on purpose,” Bruce murmurs. Every second more that passes, Darcy is closer to crawling out of her skin. 

“Is this meth? Why am I twitchy?”

“They want you strong so you can bounce back. They want you to heal so they can do it again —”

“What? Do what?” Her body is covered in an icy sweat. 

Bruce is considering lying. She can still recognize that much.

‘You owe me the truth,” she reminds him. She shouldn’t have to, not that she’s bitter or anything.

He rucks his hand through his hair. “They want to take the Other Guy out. To pull him out of me, so they can use it with a. A more willing soldier. They think I’m doing something to stop that, because it’s definitely not their shoddy science's fault.” He gulps, won’t meet her eyes. “I think they’ve —  _ altered _ the medicine they were giving you. Something for you to heal quickly if they decide...if they decide the only way to make me comply is to. To hurt you.”

Darcy wants to rip her IV out and run. Darcy wants to smash the glass between them and shake Bruce Banner’s shoulders until — until —

“Altered it with what?”

“They have my DNA, now. They have all my old research that I couldn’t destroy...Betty’s notes, mostly. It’s probably a bastardized version of the serum Steve has.”

“You have it, too.”  _ And a Hulk.  _ Tears prick sharp even as she blinks them away, screwing her eyes shut to brace herself to ask. “Do you...do you think I have —”

“ _ No _ ,” he says roughly. “You’d need radiation exposure and — no. No, Darcy, you don’t. I would never let that happen.”

_ But you let this happen _ .

Darcy swallows that down. Not helping. Not now. He’d answer for that after. She’d make sure they had an after for him to answer and grovel and everything else she deserves.

“If I’m even half as strong as Steve, the two of us have a shot, Bruce.”

Bruce says nothing.

“If I have...he can’t get sick, and you can’t either. Fuck the drugs they have me on. I don’t need to worry about an infection or whatever. And I can move, we can get out —”

“I can’t risk it,” Bruce grinds out through his gritted teeth. “If we don’t make it, they’ll — they’ll hurt you. They may kill you. I won’t risk that.”

“It’s not your decision.”

They fall quiet. They stay that way for some time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had another few thousand words written for this...but I think we'll save them for next time. This chapter is for gaining our bearings :) The real suffering is for later :)
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!!! Feedback is always appreciated <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so very much for reading! Feedback is always appreciated. Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://violetteacup.tumblr.com) if you've got the feels. :)


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